It was nearly 20 years ago that a journalism-degree-set 18-year-old kid brought his habit of reading newspapers while drinking canned Sun Drop and smoking Marlboro 100s to the wooden bench atop the Homer Pittard Campus School lawn, overlooking the MTSU James Union Building. That’s where he first delved into a very fresh copy of the Murfreesboro Pulse, the community and cultural periodical found for free at Davis Market (about the only place that sold canned Sun Drop at the time) on the way to class.
Though he may have missed a few months at the bench over the course of those 20 years, it’s above an honor to say the bench days grew into a source of somewhat unconditional support at home for a wayward journalism student intent on navigating and practicing in the struggling journalism industry of the 2000s and 2010s—another of Rawls’ kids (you know who you are, wherever you are in the world right now).
But post-graduation (six years later), and during the area-nurtured privilege of practicing under the editorship of Bracken Mayo, along with wife/art director/co-publisher Sarah and copy editor Steve Morley, the Murfreesboro Pulse crafted my words to fit the publication over some very personal and very developmental years, and provided a glimpse into the economics of modern journalism, the handling of information, and the discovery and exploration of crazy, varied forms of ethical journalism, from conceptual to critical, the serendipitous to coincidental, even discovering that journalism is the most accessible form of time travel ever known, exposing and enabling knowledge of local life and the convolutions found therein. The absolute value local journalism holds in discussing all that in an open market of ideas was found and nurtured.
Over the past 20 years local staples Mize and The Drive crafted three albums, Don Coyote was “Moving to Smyrna,” Twin Oak Recordings kept putting out the grunge-fuzz country and blues, and Alex Tumbleson released his Barnum Brown EPs.
From conducting interviews with the likes of Ricky Skaggs at my kitchen table and musical folk hero Ramblin’ Jack Elliot in the middle of a muddy field at a festival near Cookeville, Tennessee, from Sky Hi’s barn parties out on Elam, running to local punk/metal shows at The Boro, celebrating acclaimed alt-country band Those Darlins’ decade-long tenure and discovering outsider venue the CXR (Crossroads) Punk House by reviewing a Circuit Circuit EP—and even “Almost Famous”-ing Hank Williams-family legacy IV & The Strange Band as best as they’d let me during their launch into national fame—to doing stints in local jails for a series of articles explaining corruption, recidivism and busted legal systems outsourcing probation companies, the local system getting in trouble for it and then modeling the resulting county-run probation company after it (dude, I could go on) . . . that 18-year-old Middle Tennessee kid got into it at a difficult time for physical newspapers.
But the Pulse kept printing.
Embarking into local journalism can spread to the world of research, and into legislation and politics, as well as harder tasks like going to jail or finding out some figures in our community are not your friends and are not designed to be. You learn we’ve all got our own path, and stern differences, but we’re in this together, and it’s up to all of us with Pulses to differentiate and determine for our best interests, and to then tell the people, the young ones sitting on old-school benches, wet behind the ears, drinking Sun Drops and smoking Marlboro 100s.
Journalism isn’t dead.
It just took some hindsight to see the youth.
And I’m glad I had a Pulse.
