Story behind the Story: Rick Nathanson
Focusing on the stroy ABQ’s Skid Row by Rick Nathanson
This summer during my internship at the Albuquerque Journal, my desk was located right next to the desk of Rick Nathanson, a journalist who has worked for the Journal for 36 years. When I told my mom — an avid reader of the paper — that I sat next to him, she was very excited. Rick was quite the character and I really enjoyed getting to know him. But one thing was clear: he was a very talented writer, and he was passionate about the subjects he wrote about. For this reason, he immediately came to mind for the Story behind the Story assignment.
I called him a few days ago to get the scoop on how he got his start in journalism and to find out more about his story, ABQ’s Skid Row, a feature story he wrote about Albuquerque’s homeless population. According to Rick, there was never a doubt in his mind as to what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“When I was little — I grew up in Chicago — and we always had newspapers in my house,” he said. “I was always fascinated by newspapers…I would get a big sheet of paper and draw the columns and the headlines and the stories and make my own personal newspapers.”
He said the constant presence of newspapers in his home strongly influenced his career path and by the age of 10 or 11 he knew that he wanted to be a “newspaper man.”
Nathanson wanted to attend the University of Illinois but the competition was stiff and he didn’t have much money. He devised the plan of attending a community college in Chicago for two years that had an award winning newspaper. If he could get involved with that newspaper, he thought, then maybe he could get a chance at at the University of Illinois.
Nathanson became editor in chief of the newspaper at his community college and succeeded in attending the University of Illinois for his final two years of college. He and his friends weren’t fans of the school’s main student paper so a group of them started an independent newspaper, called the Independent Times. According to him, it became very successful.
After college, Nathanson spent two years in the Peace Corps on the Tonga Islands. There, he helped run the government owned newspaper, The Tonga Chronicle. When he returned to the U.S., he became a stringer for some Chicago newspapers.
He secured a job at the Albuquerque Journal in May of 1979 and the rest is history. He started out working the police beat but always wanted to be a feature writer. Eventually, he said, he succeeded in working in the feature department and became a full time feature writing. But he said the feature writing department became an “arm of the advertising department” and because of this, he grew a distaste of feature writing. It seemed as though the advertising department dictated what the feature journalists wrote about.
Once he moved back to the City Desk, Nathanson covered General Assignment but specialized in writing stories about the poor, the homeless and local nonprofits. It was during this time that a man in a pickup truck killed a homeless woman by hopping a curb and hitting her.
“My idea for the story came out of that,” Nathanson said. “Are homeless people trying to stay safer or change the way they do things given that incident? My idea for the story was to gage the homeless community on their reaction to that horrible…murder…i guess it is and find out if they were doing anything different.”
In investigating the answer to this question, Nathanson discovered that homeless people had began creating encampments of tents in different areas of Albuquerque to build safety in numbers. So, he went out with a photographer a couple of times to encampments and began talking to the people there.
I asked him what his experience was like of interacting with homeless people who were often drug addicts or criminals. His response:
“It’s estimated that 70% homeless people have mental illness in addition to substance abuse problems. When you deal with a population like that you have to be very, very careful. They’re very dangerous. I always went with a photographer who had my back. You want to listen very carefully to what they say and if you have a question about the veracity of their comments, you don’t want to say ‘Hey you’re making that up!’ Be careful not to agitate them. Oftentimes they go off on a tangent but it generates a really good story. I don’t have a secret for interviewing…ask intelligent questions and phrase in a manner that is not threatening or demeaning and then just let them talk.”
Nathanson said his biggest challenge in writing feature stories is over-researching. He becomes so passionate and excited about the topic he is covering, which makes it difficult to decide what will not be used in the story. This is something that I also struggle with, so it was helpful to know that even professional journalists face this problem, but that it’s essential to cut and revise for good writing.
