Joe Fitzgerald is a journalism student on campus who’s been covering stories for Xpress all semester – and this summer he’ll be getting trained by the New York Times!
Tell me about your background and how you got into journalism.
Sure. I grew up in a very, very wealthy neighborhood as a very, very poor kid. But, you know, rent control in San Francisco, so the apartment was the same price in the 70s as it is now. So it always had me thinking about class differences, and how much people can afford because here I am surrounded by wealthy people and like, it was all very wowing every day, and there was a little community of us.
So I got into the middle school paper, at our school, it’s called the Penguin Press, very funny. It’s in the Marina, actually, on Chestnut Street. The first person I ever interviewed was Willie Brown, who’s the ex-mayor. And there was a pack of us little mini journalists following him and what’s he say to us, he says “Oh they make miniature versions of you vultures now?” It was adorable. Penned it up and wrote some scathing, scathing article about the ex-mayor and how he tanked our economy and all this stuff. It was…the bug bit me. Bit me early.
At some point, after high school, I didn’t go straight to college, I started making documentaries, started making movies. I didn’t go to college straight on. And uh, then I decided well, why don’t I do short-term documentaries? And if I do short-term documentaries, why don’t I just write up about it? And oh, isn’t that news? Yes it is. And then I followed the news at community college.
You went to CCSF, right? What did you cover there?
Yes. Oh golly, what did we cover? Uh, well, at one point there was an outbreak of a computer virus, that kind of blew up in the national media. Supposedly stole the information of over 10,000 students’ personal data, including their banking information. Supposedly, according to the articles that came out. But the research that we did, that we covered over at City College, showed that actually there was no data stolen, no reports of that, and countered the mainstream media’s reports on things. Which was pretty fun. We covered Occupy Oakland, so I was there the night that Scott Walker got shot in the head, with the bean bag bullet thing, was nearly killed. And I remember for weeks after, having memories of the flash bangs and the tear gas grenades in my head. There was a quintuple homicide, where five people were killed in the house across the street from our school, two of which were older students in their 30s. Met one of the students’ friends, and I was actually the one to break who was killed there, because the police weren’t releasing all the details of the people. So I was able to corroborate some of the details the police gave us with house records, and the school records, and I was the one to tell all these folks yeah, I’m sorry your friend was killed. And it was bloody. This guy went in there and bludgeoned them, sliced them. There was five separate crime scenes for five separate murders, all in the same house. It was pretty ridiculous.
That was some of the stuff. There’s more, I don’t remember all of it.
Tell me about what you’re working on right now.
Well, I’m really excited because the New York Times asked me for my first pitches. So, here I am on the phone, talking to an editor at the New York Times, and he says “Okay, what’s your pitch? What’s your news pitch? Hit me.” I’m like, wow, this is what I’ve done every day at SF State and at City College, but now I’m doing it for a national newspaper. This is like…that’s it. So that was just a few days ago. And we’re gonna go to Tucson, they take you to Tucson, they pay for your flight there, they pay for your food, they pay for your housing, they give you a car. Rental, obviously. They give you a small budget of spending money, and they basically have 10 New York journalists there with 25 of us students, and they say we’re going to teach you to do what you already know how to do, but at the level of the New York Times. Which is pretty cool.
So two things we’re going to cover there: there’s a domestic partnership fight, in the town of Bisbee right now. Very small, little town of 6,000 folks, coal mining town. They’re for domestic partnership law, and some of those laws run up against state law, and the attorney general is like “No, no no.” So this battle over same-sex couple rights. The other one is a lot like City College now is losing its accreditation, Pima College near Tucson, serves the Tucson community, is also losing its accreditation. There’s this huge sex scandal, they’re one of the first schools to close their admissions process. A city college is complete open, a community college. You could have failed every class in high school and go to community college. That’s the whole point. But this community college there, they closed off their admissions, they said you know what, if you test low, we’re not going to let you in. That’s what I’m going to cover with the Times, these folks who closed off the admissions. Now they’ve since reversed that, but that experiment that lasted a year and a half, maybe two years, who’d they leave behind? Who were unable to go to school? And now are their futures complete awry? Now they can’t, they had two years not going to community college.
What are some of your favorite things that you’ve covered?
If you’ve looked at the stuff I’ve written, pretty into covering City College. But the reason for that isn’t because I’m into covering City College, but just because I was there. If you’re there at one of the largest community colleges in the country – it serves 90,000 students. That’s over three times the size of SF State. So, you know, if you’re there, in the middle of every journalism contact you’ve ever had, in the middle of it crushing down and crumbling around you, you better bet you’re going to cover it. So that was interesting.
How did getting involved with the New York Times happen?
My buddy Lulu was applying, and she said “Joe, you should apply for this.” You have to be a part of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists to apply, which I was – part Puerto Rican, well, Puerto Rican, Italian, Irish – and you just had to send in six clips and a little essay talking about why you wanted to do journalism. It really wasn’t too tough. But then the recommendations part was another part, I got a recommendation from my old editor at the Bay Guardian, I interned there for a semester. The other one was from Nannette Asimov, who’s a higher education reporter at the Chronicle.
I was afraid at first that they wouldn’t like the Bay Guardian clips, because the Times, big objective newspaper and everyone’s always hammering objectivity into us. But I called them up and they were like “No, are you kidding? Some of our best writers are from alternative newspapers, the Bay Guardian was the first alternative newspaper, don’t you know what a historic place you just worked at? They’re the ones that started everything.” And I was like hell, okay. If you guys aren’t going to mind it, that’s good to know. But the night that I found out, Lulu had received an email saying, you know, sorry, you’re portfolio is very good but we didn’t go with you this time. A few other friends of mine received emails that were the same, they weren’t getting in. And she texted me, she said “Joe, did you get your rejection email yet?” I checked my email, and no. And I checked my phone and I had call from New York that I guess I must have ignored by accident earlier, and I was like “Oh my god!” It was already like eight when I checked, so I basically stayed up all night not knowing. Cause it could have been another level of interview, not being accepted, something like that. It wasn’t necessarily saying yes, you’re in. So it was almost like Christmas, I was up all night just wanting to know what my present was. I had my buddy come over and we just had a big Star Trek night, drank lots of beer. I called the next morning and the guy over at the Times said, “So I bet you’ve been on pins and needles all night.”
It was good, I’m excited.