Refrigerator Journalism

We all have different interests, all write different things, but the career writers I know have this one thing in common.

The letters were written with a black felt tip and the ink would bleed through the paper. They were nearly illegible. Grandma had poor handwriting. They arrived once a week nearly every week I was in college. Sometimes she’d tuck a book of stamps inside the envelopes. Always there were newspaper clippings.

She would fold in a comic she thought was fun, or an article about memory or resilience. Often there would be a snippet about local history, or some author coming through town, an article about a restaurant we should try when I came through.

These ragged-edged newspaper clippings were the original way to share interesting things.

Refrigerator Journalism

Later, when I went to work as a newspaper reporter for a community newspaper, our editor had a name for these kinds of stories, the kinds that people would clip, hold onto, pass along, and stick under a magnet on their refrigerator. He called it Refrigerator Journalism.

And that’s what we aspired to. Our job was to write about what people cared about, and what they needed to know to stay safe and be active members of their community.

We wrote the things that mattered to them, covered local sports and new businesses and neighborhood happenings and people doing good things, and those who were causing trouble.

This is the kind of stuff I always wanted to write. Not the sensational, but pieces that were relevant to the readers. Pieces that they might find valuable enough to clip and send to their granddaughter.

Creating Interest

Last week I spoke with Alice Henderson on the Simply Write w/Polly podcast. She’s a novelist and wildlife biologist who combines her science background, and concern for the natural world with her love of writing and sharp storytelling in a series of keep-you-awake-at-night novels. Check out the first in the Alex Carter Series A Solitude of Wolverines.

Through the settings and issues her human and animal characters encounter in the stories, Henderson is also revealing aspects of the natural world that she hopes will fascinate readers. She wants to entertain them.

But if readers also take something away from her books that they find interesting or compelling, perhaps Henderson says, perhaps people will become more aware of environmental issues she addresses in the stories and take action in real life to help protect the animals and habitats.

Henderson says she wants writers to enjoy the stories and be intrigued, and a big part of her hopes too that she is making a positive difference in the world with the writing.

Connecting With Others

Jen Singer, a journalist who quotes Springsteen and writes articles and speeches, books, and blogs, was also a guest on Simply Write w/Polly. She’s also a ghostwriter and editor and on the surface has little in common with Henderson.

But both writers are driven to make a positive difference and they use their writing to do it.

Singer has built a successful and long writing career creating all kinds of pieces. But, nearly all of her work is motivated by a drive to empower others and to connect with readers.

In her recent series, the Just Diagnosed Guides, Singer takes what she learned from cancer, COVID, and heart failure and shares a ton of practical information in handy little information-packed books. These books are designed to help you talk to doctors, learn which questions to ask, and how to navigate the health care system when you are unwell.

Using her own challenges as an impetus Singer wanted to share with readers all the things she wished she had known when she was a patient.

Singer wants those who read her work or the writers she coaches to feel a little more connected and confident, a little more prepared and hopeful.

The Pay-Off

Writing, well done, can do all that, can’t it? It can entertain and educate us, inspire and influence us, it can lift us up, and remind us that we aren’t alone. Motivate us to do better. It can connect us and show us what’s possible.

Those are the stories we share. Those are the pieces we pass on. The things we talk about at the dinner table.

And a few of those stories? They might just end up stuck under a magnet on our refrigerators or attached to an email for your granddaughter to read. Yes, times have changed, but the power of writing has not.

-p