I just got back from a media leader’s meeting of Savannah’s Poverty Reduction Initiative. You’ve probably never heard of it, and actually it’s probably good that you haven’t.

The Initiative is a new, joint effort by business and community leaders and elected officials here to lower the disastrous poverty rate in the city of Savannah. While any number of anti-poverty plans over the years have been funded, designed and ultimately put on a shelf to be ignored, I have to say this one seems different.

The biggest difference is that the local business community is taking the lead on it, operating from the simple premise that poverty is bad for business. This is a really, really big deal. I can’t tell you how huge that is. A clear recognition that a rising tide lifts all boats may seem obvious, but a more radical point of view could hardly be imagined in today’s America, where in popular culture and in public policy, poor people are increasingly seen as some kind of defective lesser subspecies.

This is true even in inner-city communities nowadays. In many parts of Savannah’s inner city, you’re considered a sucker if you’re not selling drugs. White suburbanites have their own self-destructive equivalents; if you’re not deeply in debt so you can have an SUV and a McMansion to park it in front of, there is something obviously wrong with you. These are cliches, but cliches get that way because they contain some truth.

Jim Stevenson of Savannah Electric, one of the main corporate sponsors of the Initiative, is frank about his company’s interest in reducing poverty. Not only is reducing poverty the right thing to do, he says, but when so many people can’t afford to pay their electric bills, that hurts his company’s bottom line.

He doesn’t say it in that crass a way, of course, but even if he did I wouldn’t mind. It’s just common horse sense. Reducing poverty is a win/win situation for everybody, including the Coastal Empire’s suburban and gated community white-flighters who generally would prefer not to think about or even see these things.

The Initiative is concentrating less on getting PR brownie points than in actually putting the plan together and implementing it. Stevenson was frank this morning when he told the media gathered there that he was less interested in actual coverage of the initiative than he was in getting us to simply be a part of the initiative. In other words, reporting on poverty, not on the Initiative.

We ran a cover story on the subject late last year, specifically my first-person account of a “Poverty Simulation” role-playing game designed to drive home the downward spiral that is poverty in America. (It’s called “You Don’t Want To Go There”; find it by typing “poverty” into the search engine of this site.)

The reaction to the piece was interesting. Less affluent people who read it considered it patronizing and shallow. They said, “you can’t know what’s it’s like to be in poverty unless you really live it” — as if anyone would voluntarily quit their job and default on their home mortgage in order to write an article about poverty. It seemed a particularly cynical and self-defeating response that frankly I didn’t expect. It disappointed me in a lot ways.

More comfortable people, however, just wanted the story to go away. They did not want to learn about poverty, or discuss it, or hear about it, or even acknowledge its existence.

Some of this is simple racism, of course, the convenient and completely false notion of poverty as a strictly minority phenomenon, a black thing. Despite massive welfare reform in the mid-’90s, many white Americans still think there are generations of “Welfare Queens” out there buying Cadillacs and mink coats with welfare money — despite the fact that no American can get welfare now for more than a few years, total, and despite the fact that sixty percent of all Savannahians under the poverty line have a job.

But I have to say that racism seems to play less a role than the enormous stigma that poverty in general has in America. We still, after all these years, hew to the idea that to be poor in America is impossible unless you really want to be poor. We still, deep down inside, blame the victim.

As if someone making minimum wage can afford rent, medical bills, gas for their car, a nurse for their sick grandparent, food and clothes for their children, and — yes, I have to say it — Savannah Electric’s constant rate hikes.

It’s impossible to pay for even basic living expenses on the wage that many, many Savannahians are paid. The math just doesn’t work.

As for the chicken and egg question of what needs to come first — good jobs or a work force that can fill them — I confess I don’t have the answers. My guess is that a group effort is needed to do both at the same time. What do you think?

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Today I took part in a panel discussion, as I do every year, at the Southeast Regional Press Institute gathering at Savannah State University. It’s basically a confab for aspiring young journalists to gain some insight into the profession from working professionals, and an opportunity for people like me to speak frankly about what we’ve learned.

Dr. Novella Holmes at SSU kindly invites me every year, and it’s something I’m always happy to do. The interaction with the young whippersnappers never fails to inspire me that there’s some hope for America in general and the media profession in particular.

It’s become something of a cliche in this business for media types to get together and worry publicly about “what’s going wrong.” The daily newspaper people wonder why less and less people are reading their papers. The TV people wonder why the more time they devote to “news” the less “news” they actually broadcast.

Generally at these things I’m the only weekly editor, so I can kind of sit back and take free shots at everything. Callin’ like I see it, etc. My contention today — which judging by the reactions from the college students attending the discussion might have some accuracy — was that the media is willing to endlessly analyze every aspect of their business except for one:

What if the product just plain sucks?

This is something younger people respond to. They nod enthusiastically when I mention that perhaps the reason why young people don’t read dailies is not because young people are a) uneducated; b) illiterate; or c) too busy playing video games, but maybe because the dailies just aren’t printing anything they’re interested in.

Paul Johnson, longtime shooter for WTOC, was on the panel. Paul is always a delight, both in person and professionally, and as usual, he had some salient comments — chief of which was his rejection of the idea that the younger generation has an atrophied attention span.

Paul’s take — and I paraphrase here — is that if you feed people a steady diet of bad food, it’s only natural that they will turn away from the source of said bad food. If you assume people only want blood, dumbed-down infomercials and tabloid sensationalism, and tailor your media outlet to deliver as much blood, dumbed-down infomercials and tabloid sensationalism as possible, perhaps that — and not some mythical tragic flaw on the part of your audience — is the reason your target audience is turning elsewhere.

I have always been amazed at the breadth of our readership at Connect Savannah. Yes, it’s true that a lot of SCAD students read our paper — more than read SCAD’s own publications, as college officials will admit anonymously. But it’s also true that plenty of older folks read our paper, too. And yes, contrary to certain opinions, a lot of conservatives read our paper as well. (I was going to say “read our paper religiously,” but that would send a politically charged message that I didn’t intend.)

Prof. John English moderated the panel. I took a magazine class from him in Athens back in the day, some 19-odd years ago. He’s aged quite well, I must say. Anyway, he says that studies show that only 13 percent of today’s readers actually read an entire article all the way through from beginning to end.

Me, I think that number has always been about 13 percent. In my experience, there are two types of people in the world: Those who like to read and those who don’t.

Notice I didn’t say “liberals who like to read and conservatives who don’t.” A love of reading crosses all partisan, gender, age and race divisions.

Bottom line: I’m just after people who like to read. I will go where they are.

See, I’ve learned a few things over the years. I’ve learned that the type of people who complain about a newspaper being “too liberal” pretty much think all newspapers are too liberal. That’s the thing. Once you realize that, the rest becomes clear.

If you spend all your time worrying about pleasing those types — who in almost every case are non-readers anyway — you’re on the slippery slope to nowhere. You will water down your product so thoroughly that it becomes a thin, weak gruel.

The kind of food people turn away from after one swallow.

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There’s very little I can add to the amounts of copy that have already been written in honor/disgust/awe of the life and career of Hunter S. Thompson after his recent suicide.

Suffice it to say that, for better or worse, without Hunter S. Thompson I would probably not be in journalism. This could either be a good or bad development depending your point of view, but there it is for what it’s worth.

We all know about Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. No comment necessary there. It is so much an original text, a scripture if you will, of journalism that you no more feel the need to convert others to it than a devout Christian would feel the need to stand up in the middle of the congregation and say, “Hey, there’s this book called the Bible — I got a copy if anyone wants to borrow it.”

But his vastly underappreciated recent work, in my opinion, reaches to still-higher levels of profane insight and psychedelically violent outrage. The Bush II administration seemed to kick Thompson into a zone of disgust so profound that in the final analysis that may have been what actually killed him. (That, or the six vodka martini breakfasts and the cocaine.)

(Update: For the too-literally minded or those that just don’t get the whole Hunter S. Thompson-paranoia thing, let me be clear that I’m not saying the Bush II administration actually physically arranged the death of the guy…. mmm-kay, people?)

The voices of an irreverent, radical generation are dying quickly now: Joe Strummer, Joey Ramone, HST, etc. A younger, vastly more comfortable generation takes over, one that never knew firsthand the reality of racial segregation, of live pictures of U.S. military coffins coming home from a far-off land (“against Pentagon policy” today), of a media that took its watchdog role seriously.

Just when we need an informed press the most, it seems, we are fated to be without one. As Thompson himself wrote in 2003 :

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

Journalists today know next to nothing of Watergate, the seminal controversy and Rosetta Stone of Hunter S. Thompson’s career. Instead of burglary, Archibald Cox, the Saturday Night Massacre, the 18-minute gap, Nixon’s challenge to the Supreme Court and the Court’s powerful answer, today’s young journalists have Monica’s semen-stained dress, the Starr Report, and Linda Tripp.

Though I suppose Deep Throat could apply to both situations.

It’s one of the drawbacks, I guess, of the rise of an expanding middle class in this country, a bourgeoisie, in old-school terminology. As is usually the case with any bourgeoisie, even the scandals seem to be more pedestrian and less important. I suppose it could be enough to drive one to suicide if one let it.

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Speaking of “Savannah’s daily newspaper” — like that? — I couldn’t let this chance go by to comment on the stepping down of longtime Morning News Managing Editor Dan Suwyn. So many things about the daily — both good and bad — can be traced directly to Dan’s extremely fertile and quick (sometimes too quick) mind.

So I wanted to pay my respects with this rambling warts-and-all portrait, which I think Dan — a self-deprecating guy with a very sound sense of self-esteem - - might appreciate.

In 1998, Dan made me the classic “offer I couldn’t refuse” to leave Creative Loafing and be the new “Assistant News Planning Editor” of the Morning News — his new-age management way of saying “nightside slot editor.”

I didn’t anguish over the decision long. Creative Loafing was paying me about 23 grand at the time to bust my then-young ass six days a week, so I jumped and jumped quick. The new job offered a substantial pay hike and a position of great responsibility (though, as I would find out later, one of no credit whatsoever).

With a newborn baby and a new house to renovate, it was a no-brainer, with one condition — I would only commit to the nightside for a year. After that, I let it be known, I would be working towards a dayside job.

Dan introduced me effusively to everyone, pinning high hopes on my abilities to completely transform the way things were done at 111 W. Bay Street. I was, of course, deeply honored at the hero’s welcome, until I was told that I was Dan’s new “golden boy” — that was the exact phrase used — and that my “honeymoon period” — also the exact phrase used — would be over soon enough, after which I would be treated like crap. The same way the rest of the newsroom was treated ever since Dan’s arrival, or so the old heads said.

The problem, according to the old newsroom hounds, was that Dan elevated the design staff to the position of demi-gods. Dan’s cardinal sin in their minds was that he, quite simply, cared more about design than about the news. More about pictures than words. This, I came to find out, was not true — not by a long shot — but as we all know by now, perception is indeed reality.

Now it’s true that Dan has an expansive design background and is a remarkable designer in his own right. And it’s true that he made no secret about his effort to seriously upgrade the daily’s design sensibilities, which were indeed in dire freakin’ need of an upgrade when he arrived on the scene.

It was also true that the design staff — by virtue of their position at the end of the editorial food chain — had de facto final say over the newsroom’s hard work. A click of a mouse by a twenty-three-year-old newbie designer and a week’s worth of work by a twenty-year newsroom veteran could be butchered beyond recognition. And sometimes was.

And apparently, the designers just plain made more money than editors and reporters. I suspect this — not some fancied natural antipathy between “word people” and “picture people” — was the actual root cause of the hard feelings.

Enter young Jim.

Dan’s idea was that since I was a well-known “word guy” I would be able to represent the disgruntled newsroom and their various disgruntlements to the young design staff, which I was in charge of from 4 p.m. until the paper hit the presses.

While the trendy young designers would still wield enormous power from behind their bank of high-powered, brand-new Macs — another source of grumbling by the newsies, who were still stuck with decrepit and horrible proprietary newsroom terminals — the thought was that I, with my news background and strong local ties, would give the young’uns some much-needed grounding and old-school gravitas.

Or so that was the idea.

I took to the task with relish at first, schooling the brilliant but incredibly naive young designers on the cynical ins-and-outs of news stories and how to read between the lines to write a gripping headline that best reflected what went on in the story.

But then — as is so often the case with intrepid, lucky explorers — I went native.

The designers were so young, hip and downtown compared to the grizzled, brusque newsroom staff, many of whom seemed to just be waiting out the time until their pension kicked in.

And polite? Don’t let anyone tell you young people don’t have manners these days. The designers Dan hired were delightful, kind, considerate people — hardly deserving of the scorn heaped on them by the newsroom vets, I soon found myself thinking.

I slowly found myself beginning to think not like an editor, but like a designer. I looked at a newspaper page not primarily as a storehouse of verbal knowledge, but primarily as a canvas upon which compelling images would soon be engraved. In a final insult, I soon began taking the design staff’s side in disputes with the newsroom.

Some of this was just foxhole camaraderie, since I worked in close proximity with the designers and not with the newsroom, the bulk of which couldn’t wait to high-tail it back home to Wilmington Island and Ardsley Park at 5 p.m. sharp.

And some of it was that the designers were — how can I say this diplomatically? — just plain nicer people than the reporters and editors.

Long story short: a year came and went. A dayside position came open and Dan dodged the terms of our original deal by taking resumes from inside and outside the company.

Having learned the hard way about Dan’s “golden boy syndrome,” I knew the open job would not go to me, but instead to a sainted, haloed outsider, come to completely transform the way things were done at 111 W. Bay Street.

Appropriately enough, the new golden boy who eventually got the job was named — wait for it — Steve Austin. I kid you not. Yes, the same name as the wrestler and the six million dollar man.

Turns out I didn’t even get the satisfaction of nursing a grudge. Steve Austin was such a damn nice guy, and so obviously better qualified for the job than me, that all I could do was admit that Dan had done the right thing by the newspaper.

About that same week, I got a call from the publisher of Creative Loafing. Their editor was leaving, and would I like to come back and give it another try? For a lot more money this time?

I did not anguish about that decision either. I jumped and jumped quick. A few years later the paper merged with Connect Savannah, and the rest is history.

And each day that goes by at Connect Savannah, I try to adhere to that same vision of a perfect union of design and news — of words and pictures — I learned from Dan Suwyn, the man an entire newspaper loved to hate.

I still think the photos in the Morning News are too damn big. And I still think Dan’s idea to switch the newsroom from the tried-and-true beat system to the “team” system has not panned out to the paper’s advantage.

But for all its many, many faults, one cannot doubt that Savannah’s daily is still a better paper for having Dan Suwyn run its day-to-day news operations for as long as he did.

Here’s to you Dan, and best of luck to you, whatever it is that you go on to do.

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When our current publisher, Kyle Sims, took over what was then called Creative Loafing several years ago, I wanted to lay down the law. There may be a new sheriff in town, I thought, but Judge Jim’s court was still in session.

So I told him, “You know, I don’t want to still be here doing this when I’m forty.”

Kyle was curious and amused. “Why not?” he asked.

“A newspaper like this needs a younger editor,” was my breezy reply. “There are alternative papers all over the country with 50 and 60 year old editors. Pathetic. Those granolas need to move on.”

Well, I turned forty this past Feb. 19, with the commensurate amount of hoopla. And apparently I’m still here, though not quite at granola status yet.

Kyle, quite rightly, still teases me about that conversation, that “Mick Jagger moment,” as he calls it — a reference to the sixty-year-old Stones frontman’s famous and now completely inoperative quote, “I’d rather be dead than singing ‘Satisfaction’ when I’m forty-five.”

Still, for some reason I’ve never felt younger, at least in spirit if not entirely in body. I guess I’m one of those people who thinks like an old person when they’re young, and gets more youthful in outlook as they get older. Or at least I keep telling myself that.

I would hope that if one day I get really, really bad at this job — like, oh say, tomorrow — I would have enough of a clue to move on. Probably, though, I’ll hang on to the bitter end like everyone else, like one of those aging quarterbacks that ends a good career on a different team than the one he broke all those records playing for — first as a struggling starter in an unfamilar uniform, and then as a clipboard holder on the sidelines.

Speaking of careers, brilliant and otherwise: Despite working in journalism in this town off and on for nearly twenty years, I’ve still managed to miss out on being in all those cheesy year-end features the Savannah Morning News does to highlight self-absorbed young white people — uh, I mean “up-and-coming movers-and-shakers” — in our fair community. God knows I’m as self-absorbed as the next white boy. There’s no justice, I tell ya.

For example, I missed getting in “Thirty Under Thirty” by a mile. And the deadline for “Forty Under Forty” just passed — though considering I’ve been editor of their competition in the interim decade I probably stood next to no chance of making the cut.

(Savannah’s daily still has a vaguely Kremlin-style policy of never directly mentioning our paper’s name in their pages. Occasionally, Diversions will slip up and include it, but generally we are referred to as “a local weekly newspaper.” Tom Barton, God love him, was really thinking out of the box recently when he referred to me in a column as editor of Creative Loafing — four years after we had become Connect Savannah. )

I don’t reckon they’ll ever do a “Fifty Under Fifty” series, but hey, if they do I want to go ahead and put my hat in the ring now. Don’t worry, Morning News folks — you can still call it “a local weekly newspaper” if you really want to.

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