My Date With the New York Times: The Lost Journalist in Rome

It’s not hard to get lost in Rome. Even when you know exactly where you are, you could be missing the one thing you’re looking for.

In my case, it was the Rome office for the New York Times where I was hoping to discover exactly how to start a journalism career in Europe. On the main road of Corso Vittorio Emanuele, I stood with building 153 to my left and 155 to my right. I needed 154. I stopped in the spot where this building should be, but the road opened up into a tiny piazza, a small open park-like area made of cobblestone where there should be grass, where instead of 154 was a statue of Marco Manghetti and the entrance to il Museo di Roma, a place I had passed countless times when crossing the street from the piazza of Campo dei Fiori to Piazza Navona. But I was lost and confused in an area I thought I knew well.

I called Ian Fisher, the Rome Bureau Chief, who directed me about half a block west and across the street where 154 rested randomly among the 170s.

A man in a pink pinstriped dress shirt and glasses came outside to meet me. I noticed that he wasn’t very tall but he was fairly soft-spoken and serious. We walked toward Largo Argentina where we met up with Tyler, a photographer for the Times who was visiting Fisher and crashing on his couch. Tyler was a tall, dark, earthy looking man with a strong smile and accompanying handshake.

The three of us walked through the tiny dirty cobblestone streets of Roma Centro to a crowded pizzeria where we discovered another New York Times writer: Peter Keifer, the youngest of the three where the only thing giving away his age was the start of crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes and mouth. We gathered around a table in our small exclusive group, eating pizza a taglia and discussing the important matters of being an American journalist in Rome.

“I was lucky,” said Fisher. “It was a reward for going to Iraq.”

Fisher has been working for the Times for over 17 years and came to Rome three years ago after doing his time reporting from Salahuddin. “Not many people get this opportunity to come to Rome,” he said. “It was also the only place my wife was interested in at the time.”

In Rome, it isn’t hard to find work, Fisher said, but making money and a living is another story.

“It’s a hard time for journalism right now,” he said. “There’s just no cash.”

Keifer said the same thing, explaining that he doesn’t want to stay in Rome as a journalist for much longer.

“I have a contract with the Times, but I’m not on staff,” he said. “I’m at that age where I need something a little more stable that offers me more money. It’s just too hard right now. There’s no money in journalism.”

Keifer came to Rome from Los Angeles while working for a magazine that had opened up a Rome base. He snagged the job because in his youth he had lived in Rome with his family and had a basis in the language and culture.

“It was sort of a favor,” he said.

About a year ago, Fisher hired him as a correspondent for the Times.

“I’m lucky because there’s not much work left here in Rome for journalists,” Keifer said.

According to Fisher, three major American newspapers, including the Washington Post, have closed their bases in Rome.

“A lot of places are closing their foreign offices,” Fisher says. “We used to have an office in Greece and a couple other places that are closed now. There’s just nothing happening in Europe anymore.”

However, Washington Post reporter, Pamela Constable disagrees. In the February 2007 report, Demise of the Foreign Correspondent, Constable wrote, “Knowing about the world is not a luxury; it is an urgent necessity,” listing experiences and revolutions she’s witnessed in foreign countries (“the boulevards of Manila, flooded with peaceful demonstrators chanting for Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos to abandon power. The slums of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where a joyful, gyrating mob of slum-dwellers is celebrating the election of populist priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide as president. The highlands of Guatemala or Peru, where grave sites conceal the victims of atrocity”) as knowledge she wouldn’t have been able to share with America had the Boston Globe not had a foreign correspondent.

“But instead of stepping up coverage of international affairs,” continued Constable, “American newspapers and television networks are steadily cutting back. The Globe, which stunned the journalism world last month by announcing that it would shut down its last three foreign bureaus, is the most recent example. Between 2002 and 2006, the number of foreign-based newspaper correspondents shrank from 188 to 141.”

There is only a short list of U.S. newspapers that still have foreign correspondents: the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, McClatchy, the Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

The amount of money it takes to maintain a foreign office is a huge reason why many are closing.

“A typical newspaper bureau overseas costs at least $250,000 a year, according to foreign editors,” wrote Constable, “and a large, security-conscious news operation in a city such as Baghdad can hemorrhage four times that.”

Fisher added, as we took the elevator to the tiny Times office, that since a large

portion of European journalistic work comes through freelancing and the Associated

Press, there isn’t a high demand for European offices.

The office has about four rooms: a large room at the entrance with the desk for the secretary and cabinets for the files, a smaller room with two unkempt desks back to back (one belongs to Keifer), a lounge area with a well-used loveseat, and another large office with an enormous bright blue chair that stood out from the otherwise neutral gray room. This was Fisher’s place. He slouched comfortably into the chair and apologized again for the current state of journalism.

“It’s just me,” he said referring to the actual staffed writers. “We only have about five other employees. The office is very small and it will probably get smaller because,” he said repeating himself with emphasis, “there’s just no cash.”

This problem, however, isn’t due only to the lack of money available to offices abroad. “Now the web has taken over opinion and news,” Fisher said.

With the lack of jobs available in journalism in Rome or abroad in general, I wondered how to get a job without having to work for a paper for 15 years. People have often said that it’s all about who you know, networking and making connections. Fisher doesn’t believe it.

“I knew one minority intern,” he said. “It helps [to know someone] but it’s not decisive. If you can’t write, you can’t write.”

We parted with the only thing he could genuinely offer

me as an aspiring journalist finding myself in the lost part of

Rome: “Good luck.”

Love and Seams

I wrote this two years before moving to New York. It is a very powerful and personal piece, but I wanted to share it. I changed all the names so to honor the privacy of those involved. Here it is:

The city is full. I can’t take the unbalance of ripping seams everywhere you go. It’s full of the obvious: trash bags of half-eaten dinners of the New Yorkers and tourists, twenty-something-year-old businessmen with thick-rimmed Prada eyeglasses and well-defined crows’ feet from faking laughs at executive meetings, fading fashion trends and shoes unfit to be walking these city streets. But it’s the jealously that rips the seams and overflows into the street, mixing with the miasma of the subways and half-eaten dinners. You feel it the city when you step out of Penn Station. It enters through your ears and it stays with you for the duration of your stay, like a guided tour of I want, I need, and I wish.

The women here have the men I want, the job I should have, the shoes that I could never wear. I could never walk like they walk in those shoes: so quickly with their necks fully erect, weaving in between the rest of us like we’re fire hydrants or orange construction cones.

A woman in her late fifties dressed all in black smiles proudly as she stands at the corner with her well-groomed, well-behaved Doberman pinscher. He’s beautiful, shiny fur and impeccable posture. We all want her dog and she smiles because she knows it.

When Dad and I reached the AMC Theater at 68^th and Broadway my cousin, Jacob, my sister, Sonya, and her ex-boyfriend, Haleel, are waiting outside for us. She’s so pretty as she glides her way across the pavement in a pair of those shoes. She introduces us to some of the cast and crew of the movie we are about to see, directed and produced by Haleel’s brother, Umit, and co-written by Jacob. It is premiering tonight at Tribeca film festival. I hug Jacob and I want to be in the movie, I wish I had been a part of it.

We take our seats and Sonya sits across the isle from us with Haleel and the other members of the cast and crew in one of the fifteen seats allotted for them. The lights go down and Sonya is close to Haleel, like she never left him. The faces in the dark stare as the narrative comes in and for an hour and a half, I wish.

When the credits roll, we look for the names we know: Sonya is up there, my other cousin Tasha, aunts and uncles and their children. My dad says, “That was my car they used in that scene. Why isn’t my name up there?” My name isn’t up there either.

We head to the afterparty. My sister is already there at the bar with a vodka pineapple and Haleel. I feel so out-of-place but I don’t let her order me a drink. I hang out by the bar with them until I can no longer stand my surroundings, the forced laughter and men grabbing my waist as they pass behind me. I leave them looking like they’re in love.

On the street, Dad walks ahead because my black flats hurt my feet and all this wanting has worn me out. I want the train to take me home.

In the morning she calls me saying, “Haleel hit me. I have bruises on my back and arms.” A friend kissed her on the cheek and Haleel slid his arm around her neck in a headlock and brought her ear to his mouth. “Don’t ever fucking do that again. My girl doesn’t do that shit. She got up to leave and he chased her. He backed her into a corner and punched her in the ribs. “You’re not going anywhere.” When she got onto the sidewalk, he chased her down again and grabbed her arm so hard he left bruises in the shape of fingers. He dug his nails into her back and she slapped him in the face, “Don’t ever touch me again!”

In the cab he said he wasn’t sane. He yelled, “Do you think I care about this life?” It continued through the cab ride, into the elevator and up to the loft apartment. He wouldn’t get his hands off of her, grabbing at her arms and ripping the seam of her jacket. “If you want me to disappear, I’ll disappear. You’ll never hear from me again.” When Haleel’s father and brother arrived at the apartment and saw what he had done to Sonya, the woman he supposedly loved, they demanded that he leave. Sonya stood there in her ripped jacket, watching him disappear.

She called me later crying. Her life is ruined, everything has changed, she will never forget this, how could this happen to her? She’s so confused. What happened to love? It was overruled by a greater force that entered through the ears. It ripped with the seam.

Hey, Suburbia! We're in love with you.

I bought a Tivo. I don’t even watch TV, but I’ve been brainwashed by suburban materialism and all its superficial counterparts. My life is full of everything I don’t want. I worked for years at a job in clothing retail (which I justify by noting that all the logo t-shirts and many of the dELiA*s brand items are made in the U.S.A. which means sweatshop free) for a store that is quickly blossoming into a corporate nightmare.

I sell things. I sold to mothers who had nothing better to do than come to the mall and shop for their spoiled teenage daughters. I told them what’s hot for the season and I sold. But I never lied. I stopped shoplifters like I cared if they took some underwear. They probably needed them more than the company needed to sell them. They have babies at 15 and the father is in jail because he hasn’t been paying the child support. Take the fucking underwear. I’ll pretend I didn’t see.

And I buy. I buy what’s hot for the season because we have to look fashionable and hip. Most of the time I don’t even wear it. I wear it once to validate my reason for buying it. Then it lays crumpled on my bedroom rug for months. Until next season’s line comes out.

We had to show the mothers what their daughters should look like. We had to have our hair done and our make-up caked and our toenails painted to match our fingers. “Don’t look like you just rolled out of bed. You are the face of dELiA*s.” For 3 years, I was the face of dELiA*s. But sometimes, I didn’t shower.

I grew up in suburbia, where the Smoking Joe’s cigarette shop always has its neon OPEN sign lit up. At 2 am when the traffic lights have switched into sensor mode and parking lots in the strip malls are empty, the neon sign still invites us in while the iron toothed gate is locked across the Plexiglas double doors. “Just leave it on,” says the lazy part of the psyche. “We’ll be open again in the morning anyway.”

One day I will live off the land. Wind energy, organic gardens, homemade bread and a hand built house. Indoor plumbing? Maybe. The woods are my backyard. Sometimes I can’t shake the feeling that I want to live comfortably. That convenience is a necessity like Starbucks and shopping carts. But mostly I can’t respect this lifestyle my generation has grown up in. I want to be in nature, learn things by doing them and not hearing about them or watching them on TV. I want to know how to cook and make and build and fix everything I will ever need. I want to be free from this bubble of highways, developments, LAND for sale realty, sensored traffic lights and neon OPEN signs we’ve built around ourselves. I want human nature to go back to being natural. Life without Tivo.