Photo By slim Jim Puvee

Jessica Turner

My Anti-Story
By Jessica Turner:

To say it's a less than exciting story is an understatement. Mine is the anti-story.

I was a student at Eastern Kentucky University (EKU) looking for an internship because my adviser at the school paper encouraged me to get one. Unlike most employees, I didn't have any personal CityBeat connections. I definitely liked the publication -- ever since high school afternoons spent sitting at the Highland Coffeehouse giggling at the personals ads -- and really admired the honest reporting while in college. I didn't have a job lined up for the summer, so I figured I'd give it a shot.

Certain I wouldn't hear anything back after sending in a laughable clip file and resume, I was surprised to learn of the phone call that came a couple weeks later, minutes after I left my apartment in Richmond, Ky., to drive up to Florence for an interview with the Community Press newspapers.

But I never interviewed at CityBeat. Brandon Brady, then-copy editor as well as literary and listings editor, and I couldn't get our schedules in sync. After about three phone conversations, Brandon decided my interning would work out just fine. And that was it. Had I known they'd take just about anyone with a pulse, I would've been on this internship thing years earlier.

I like to think Brandon saw something extraordinary in me -- he's quick to admit now that "geeky" was his first impression -- but I'm pretty sure he just needed one more body to help compile calendar listings.

After my summer internship I went back to EKU for my final semester. Somewhere around the end of November I was asked to come back part-time as an editorial aide. Nine months later, I became a full-time staffer.

The rest is unhistory. ©

Free Trade
By Kathy Y. Wilson:

Photo By Wendy Uhlman

Kathy Y. Wilson

A promotional photograph of Miles Davis and Easy Mo Bee was my first pay stub from John Fox. Try reporting that to the IRS.

I wrote for Everybody's News a review of Doo Bop, Davis' Hip Hop nod, final studio recording and the answer to a Trivial Pursuit question. This was the early 1990s.

No riots yet, no collaboratives, initial-laden development or feel-good groups that, if put together, actually make sense (i.e., 3CDC CAN). EN was a grimy little rag void of design but with open doors. It really was everybody's.

John then was EN's editor and Mike "The Music Whisperer" Breen, CityBeat's music editor, was EN's music editor. John has always had this way of making people feel "great" about working for free -- chipping in, doing work they love and would do for free anyway. As in: "Great. Another assignment from John. For free!"

Who'm I kidding? I was an under-employed, part-time insurance-less "writer" working at the Main Library desperate to just write. So I marched into EN. (Actually, I rode the closet-sized, rickety elevator. It was so slow the ascension felt like monkeys operated pulleys from the basement.)

I was acting on a tip from a likewise part-time library staffer who copy edited EN for free. She said Fox was always looking for contributors. Short on Jazz, I was convinced the paper needed me. It was that easy.

I've been down with CityBeat from the beginning.

John called me after he left EN and re-emerged with the idea for CityBeat. I met him in the Provident Bank Building, and there was Breen working on his own laptop, a windowsill for a desk.

The premiere issue contains my review of a Betty Carter CD but not my name among the short list of contributors in the masthead. After consulting an attorney over that slight, I decided to stay on at CityBeat, supplementing my paltry salary as the Official Black CityBeat Babysitter (OBCBB). I've kissed more white babies than Dubya.

After such time he gave me the column he'd been promising for nearly two years, time I spent writing CityBeat feature stories on the mating rituals of exotic butterflies, Classical music I knew squat about and a paraplegic Irish tenor. In gratitude for nearly 13 years of service (including the EN work), John and his wife have named their girl and boy after me -- Kathy X. and Kathy Y., respectively.

Photo By slim Jim Puvee

Gregory Flannery

John's wife, mother and sister are all named Kathy. It's complicated. But basically, any one of them can write in my stead without changing their names. For free, of course.

Hey, it's how I got my start. And just look at me now: Paid in full. ©

My Editor's Odd Behavior
By Gregory Flannery:

When the editor of CityBeat invited me to apply for a job, I thought he hadn't paid attention to anything I'd said. I'd just finished telling John Fox about a union campaign I'd started at another newspaper. I listed the inadequate wages, unfair working conditions and unethical editorial practices that motivated our campaign. The company had responded quickly and severely to talk of a union drive. One week after the first meeting between employees and representatives of the Newspaper Guild, the company suspended me without pay. After I wrote a letter to my co-workers saying the union planned to fight this retaliation, the company extended my suspension to four weeks. Fox called for an interview, planning to write about the union fight. I received his call as a mixed blessing. Publicity would put pressure on my employer, but it would also mark me again as a troublemaker on the job.

In the Beginning
By John Fox:

So I'd decided that I needed to quit my job as editor of Everybody's News and start a new weekly newspaper. I knew my ideas would work, but I didn't know anyone with money to invest in such an unlikely proposition.

I confided in Daniel Brown, who was writing art features for me, and Jon Hughes, the venerable UC professor who'd been a mentor as I struggled to grow Everybody's News. They agreed to help find an investor.

We came up with a profile of the perfect business partner: He'd be an arts supporter, knowing that alt weeklies focus a good deal on arts and culture; he'd be an entrepreneur, relishing the challenge of starting a new business; and he'd be fairly apolitical, not loading the paper with personal baggage.

Photo By slim Jim Puvee

John Fox

The first person Daniel and Jon recommended was Tom Schiff, and the four of us had lunch at the old Cable House restaurant in Walnut Hills. I learned of Tom's career in the insurance business, his participation on the boards of the Cincinnati Art Museum and Contemporary Arts Center and his foray into video production with Lightborne. He learned from me that alt weeklies thrive in major cities across the U.S. and that Cincinnati was ripe for a well-run free weekly.

We eventually agreed to an arrangement in which Tom would provide me an office, a computer and a phone and I'd write a business plan for a new paper. When the plan was finished, he'd have the right of first refusal -- if he liked my plan, we'd move forward; if not, I was free to shop my plan to others.

I quit Everybody's News and showed up at Lightborne's offices on a Monday, not telling anyone there what I was doing. I'd hoped to stay below everyone's radar for a while before word leaked out about a new paper.

After a few days, four or five Lightborne people came into my little office, closed the door and demanded to know who I really was and why Tom had put me there to spy on them. After swearing them to secrecy, I told them my story.

The Lightborne staff became CityBeat's first fans -- long before we chose the name CityBeat -- and encouraged me at every step of the way. They'll never know how important their contributions were. ©

Just a Year
By Rick Pender:

My byline has been part of CityBeat since the beginning. I was one of those freelancers who John Fox dragged along with him from the EveryBody's News days.

But in the first few years of CityBeat, I was having a good time as a regular contributor, writing theater reviews while working full-time for the city's largest public relations agency. I'd always been intrigued by the fantasy of sliding over to the other side and becoming a journalist, but that never seemed very realistic, until one day in early 1998 when John took me to lunch and told me CityBeat needed an Arts & Entertainment Editor. Was I interested?

His timing wasn't great: I was taking on more management responsibilities at the agency and planning to get married in the spring. When I asked Joan, now my wife, what she might think of me working at CityBeat instead of at an influential public relations firm, she suggested I might be accused of a bait-and-switch.

Stephanie Dunlap

It was a tough decision: I liked working in public relations, and I'd been successful at it. But the attraction of writing about the arts -- especially theater -- on a full-time basis was tempting, even though it would mean a pay cut.

John persisted and made the best offer he could (still a sizeable reduction from what I had earned), so I told him I'd accept -- but I could only promise him a commitment of one year. After that, I said solemnly, I'll probably jump back into the business world where I can make some serious dollars.

That was more than six years ago. As the Stephen Sondheim song says, "I'm still here." And enjoying every minute of it.

There's seldom a day when I don't pinch myself and say, "I'm being paid to do what I love." That's a pretty good way to make a living. ©

How to Become a CityBeater
By Stephanie Dunlap:

Answer an ad between shifts as a waitress. Get turned down for lack of experience. Wait tables for another year, answering phones and entering data at a photo lab a second year. Get a query about freelancing. Learning CityBeat will again be hiring.

Take every story you're given and propose others. Work as hard as you know how. Do twice the amount you have to. Generally ingratiate yourself. Drink martinis with your prospective news editor.

Admit your weaknesses and recognize your strengths. Work harder. Try to be less shy around Editor John Fox.

When hired, thank your lucky stars, never forget the humility of working in the service industry or the lessons about human nature you've learned there. Keep working as hard as you know how.

Mike Breen

My training, if you can call it that, is in creative writing. I also nurse a tendency to believe in the basic honesty of people. So when I first started, someone fed me this great story and I ran to tell my editor, Greg Flannery.

After I finished breathlessly, he said, "Do you think that's true?"

"What do you mean, is it true?" I asked.

I didn't even realize reporters sat at the press table behind Cincinnati City Council members until I'd sat in the audience for several months and wondered where The Cincinnati Post's Kevin Osborne kept disappearing to.

Deciding to forcibly overcome shyness, I walked up to Cincinnati Enquirer political reporter Greg Korte in council chambers and asked what was all over his forehead. It was Ash Wednesday. ©

Breakin' Rocks
By Mike Breen:

Like a few other "lifers," my route to CityBeat begins a few years before it came into existence. In the early '90s, when Cincinnati seemed like it was on the cusp of possibly being the next big musical hub, I happened to run into an old high school acquaintance (and eventual close friend), David Pescovitz, at then-underground-music-haven Shorty's in Corryville after driving back from a Jane's Addiction concert in Dayton.

David was the music editor of the weekly Everybody's News, and we casually talked about the possibility of me writing a few album reviews for the paper. I had no writing experience outside of college class assignments, but I was deeply passionate about music and had been all of my life.

I was also a voracious consumer of music publications, always scanning the pages for insight and the latest news from the music world. There have been times in my life where I've probably spent more money on Rock magazines than food.

Jason Gargano

I'd also been playing in bands since high school, gigging at Punk Palace, The Jockey Club and Bogart's and then mustering up enough energy the next morning to drag my sorry ass back to class. Performing with other "real" local musicians on bills made me become even more interested in Cincinnati area music, a love that developed when I was a pre-teen whose favorite band was The Raisins (one of my greatest thrills ever was witnessing The Bears soundcheck before the first Cincinnati Entertainment Awards).

Around the same time, I also remember being in awe of arty New Wave bands like Red Math and Sleep Theatre. I went to see local bands several times a week, but I never thought of it as "supporting the local music scene." Good music is good music, no matter where it's from. The fact that there was and is so much of it in our backyard is just a nice bonus.

So if there was anything that I knew about, it was Cincinnati music. Given all of these factors (coupled with the fact that I could string a couple of sentences together), it now seems logical that I'd pursue a career in "music journalism."

But at the time I was floundering in college studying psychology and becoming increasingly anxious about what I was going to do with my life. In that sense, CityBeat saved me from a miserable life of doing shit that I didn't want to do just to make some dough. But more on that jump later. At Everybody's News, writing about music was an unpaid hobby. But my feet were wet.

After David had invited me to write more (for the record, my first actual story of any kind was about the local Art Rock band Bulbous), I came into the EN offices to meet John Fox for the first time. I was nervous, but, as most people who have met him will attest, John is one of the most disarming folks you'll ever meet. He was also a big music fan, so I think we clicked pretty much right away.

Those old EN offices on Seventh Street were a blast -- people smoking cigarettes, banging away on computers and putting together what was a pretty solid altweekly. It was a world I was completely new to, but the loose, seat-of-the-pants energy of the situation sucked me in completely.

David "groomed" me for the music editor position at EN when he moved into the assistant editor role (and eventually to California). He had been diligent in his efforts to intensely cover local music in EN; his weekly "Scene and Heard" piece was the first real column dedicated to local music in Cincy that I'm aware of.

It was important to us that local music be treated respectfully, just as the national bigwigs were. So I inherited a solid music section that laid the groundwork for what I'd strive to do for years to come.

About a year or so later, John stopped me outside of the offices and pulled me aside, saying he needed to talk to me. He said something to the effect of "I'm leaving the paper ... and starting a new one." For a split second, I thought he was simply giving me an early goodbye, but then he asked me to come along and be the music editor of this new publication, which was to be bigger and better. And, best of all (at least in the eyes of my parents), I'd actually get paid!

That small, simple notion -- paying people who work for you -- says a lot about the Everybody's News defections. EN was fun and a great learning experience, but quality suffers when you rely on college kids to supply all of your content at no cost. CityBeat was not just an adventure -- it was a job.

Photo By Sean Hughes/photopresse.com

Steve Ramos

I had coincidently moved to New York City for an internship that would have me back in Cincinnati just a few months before starting work at CityBeat. So when I returned, I bailed on college, my deli/bakery gig at Kroger's and EN, and started over.

I remember those first few set-up months were used to reconnect with hundreds of record labels and publicists so we could be added to their mailing list. Tedious, but I loved every second of it.

I'm a lucky man to be a part of this paper, and I don't mean that because CityBeat is the greatest weekly newspaper ever (it is, but that's not what I mean). I genuinely lucked into the position -- right place, right time and all of that junk.

Whenever the chips get down and I get burned out and start to dread working, I just think of those early years and remind myself of my good fortune. My mantra for bad work days: "It beats breakin' rocks." ©

About Time
By Jason Gargano:

Turn to page 74. See the movie times lovingly rendered in black and white? I owe my existence at CityBeat to them.

Each and every movie time on that page is entered by a human being. At one point, that human being was me. Apparently, I was told, someone reads that page.

Each Tuesday afternoon I would enter CityBeat World Headquarters (CWH) eager to tackle that week's allotment of times faxed to us by various cinema in the Greater Cincinnati area. Armed with a Sonic Youth mix tape and a big black coffee, I attacked those times with a ferocity only an unpaid intern can muster.

The times were entered into a lime green iMac that was stuffed in the back left corner of a room known as "the cave." (The room is now part of CityBeat lore, as CWH migrated a couple blocks northwest nearly three years ago.)

Around that time I remember stopping a girl on the street. She was looking at the page with the movie times. "I entered those," I said. "Really, this page is so useful," she said.

After a few months of time entering, a person who was paid to be at CWH left the paper. I replaced her. ©

The Accidental Critic
By Steve Ramos:

What I've told past interns or college students interested in a career in film criticism about my start at CityBeat is anything but inspiring and, sadly, riddled with clichés. What's frustrating to many would-be critics is that I expressed no early interest to become a journalist or attended journalism school.

Granted, I was a lifelong film buff and my parents regularly point out my strange fascination for religiously watching the PBS review show Sneak Previews by Chicago critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert at an early age. Yet I never consciously sought out film journalism.

Instead, as a lackadaisical college student at multiple liberal arts colleges, I worked to combine my film love with a heady interest in all things metaphysical. I'd teach philosophy of film -- or so I thought -- which I've since learned is as practical as setting out to become an astronaut.

Tuition bills piled up, and my professorial dreams flew out the window. As a result, I became the accidental critic.

CityBeat Editor John Fox likes to remind me that a past girlfriend is responsible for my writing career -- meaning that I'm only as good as the woman behind me pushing. Fox ran the since-shuttered weekly paper Everybody's News. The girlfriend was an intern at the paper, and I was the boyfriend who she insisted knew everything about movies and would make a bang-up critic. She was convincing, and I was hired to write reviews and stories for free (although when I left Everybody's News in August 1994 to become part of the CityBeat start-up staff, I was being paid a modest $25 per story).

The cliché truth to my story is that, like all journalists, I've paid my career dues -- working for nothing and working for next to nothing. More importantly, I've come to love my job, so much so that I seldom consider the possibilities of a teaching career.

The accidental critic has become a professional one.

I wonder if that long-ago girlfriend also told Fox that I have the roaring sense of self-importance necessary to be a critic, to believe that your opinions have value. If I hadn't become a critic, such self-love would have only gotten me in trouble. ©