LA Times Journalist To Participate In SUNY Program
Author, journalist and professor all fit the description of the man who will be coming to share his expertise.
From March 24-26, SUNY Fredonia welcomes back alumnus and Los Angeles Times journalist Scott Martelle.
Martelle will be participating in a three-day residency and leading a discussion titled “Skipping through Chaos: Journalism in the Trump Era.”
During the events, partakers will explore the role and importance of an aggressive press, especially in the Trump era, as well as the art of writing books of history through a journalistic prism for general audience.
Martelle views the craft of journalism as more than a job or career.
“It’s a way of engaging with the world,” he said. “And you have to get accustomed to that.”
His time spent in Western New York was only a short stop on his path to journalistic and literary success.
Martelle’s father and grandfather both worked in newspapers, and at age 15 or 16, he realized that he was going to be a journalist.
He wasted no time getting started.
“When I was in high school, I covered high school sports for the local weekly,” Martelle said.
Shortly after, he started working part-time for the local daily as well.
“By the time I got to Fredonia, I had already worked two small-town papers,” Martelle said.
Martelle’s path to his degree was not the most conventional.
Originally starting school with a four-year plan, he admits, “It kind of blew up on me.”
During his time at Fredonia, Martelle was news director of the radio station and also editor-in-chief of The Leader.
As editor, he remembers taking on the challenge of going from a weekly paper to publishing two papers a week.
Although heavily involved in his craft, Martelle described himself as, “The world’s worst student,” estimating that he probably attended 15 percent of his classes at Fredonia.
When asked if he had any mentors during his time at Fredonia, he said, “I wouldn’t call them mentors.”
Martelle took a two-semester art of writing class with Steve Warner, a now-retired English professor. He remembers him as someone who left an impact.
“He was really good working with me on writing,” he said. “Kind of the no (BS) approach to writing.”
Martelle also recalled Dan Berggren, who helped advise the campus radio station.
“He was a pro, just a tremendous influence,” he said.
On top of his schoolwork, Martelle got a job freelancing for the Jamestown Post Journal. Growing up in the small town of Wellsville, N.Y, he remembered being overwhelmed by Jamestown’s circulation of about 35,000.
“I was like holy cow, this is a big paper,” he said.
By the time graduation rolled around, he still owed about 12 credits.
“But I also had a job offer from the Post Journal to go full-time,” Martelle said. “So I just went to work.”
After three years in Jamestown, he moved to Rochester to work at the Rochester Times-Union. Gannett, the company that owned the paper, had a tuition reimbursement program and offered to pay him to finish his degree.
“So I thought ‘what the hell,'” Martelle said.
He finished the degree requirements at Brockport and graduated in 1984 with a political science degree.
Martelle later moved to Michigan where he worked for The Detroit News.
After some time, he wanted to move on to a bigger and better paper.
“I applied different places [but] just couldn’t get the traction,” he said.
With a wife and two young children at home, it was starting to look like they were going to be staying in Detroit.
Then in 1997, he landed a job at the Los Angeles Times.
But his nearly a decade spent as a journalist in Detroit was not forgotten. His infatuation with the city as a story would later lead him to write “Detroit: A Biography.”
Writing for the Los Angeles Times provided an opportunity for Martelle to uncover some intriguing stories.
“As for what drives the story, it’s really kind of a holy sh** moment,” he said. “Something grabs your curiosity and you see where it goes.
“More seriously, always question why you think you know what you know. You have to constantly second guess yourself; hubris destroys journalism.”
Martelle, who has taught journalism at Chapman College in California, warned to double-check everything and to be wary of sources that may have ulterior motives. He said journalists have to be ready to commit if they really want to be successful.
“You’re all in,” he said. “A lot of people aren’t willing to put in that kind of time.”
Martelle recalled a grueling period during the 2004 presidential campaign.
“I left home expecting to be gone for three days [and] didn’t get home for like five or six weeks,” he said.
Changing gears toward his books, it’s clear that he’s passionate about them.
Martelle’s website says, “Two types of stories are sure to draw my interest: Interesting people framed within their times, and faded moments of American history.”
This is evident in the books he has written thus far.
“You get more freedom with book writing,” he said.
The first book Martelle wrote was “Blood Passion: The Ludlow Massacre and Class War in the American West.”
“[The Ludlow Massacre] had been written about quite a bit in labor histories,” Martelle said. “A couple of books done on the strike itself, one of them wasn’t done very well at all, and the other was kind of hard to track, and nobody knew how many people had died in this thing.”
“I missioned to, my first book, to try to at least set the fundamental threshold of knowledge of what really happened at this thing,” he said.
So Martelle started digging into the events and the people who were involved.
“You have to get obsessed with these things to write a book,” he said.
Martelle opened up his book with a narrative of an organizer who was the first person to get killed in the struggle before the strike even began.
Through intensive research, “I was able to recreate his path from Denver, down to the spot where he was killed,” he said. “And that was just a lot of fun, to be into the archives, digging into old photos.”
Since then, Martelle has written several more books. His sixth, “William Walker’s Wars,” about an American whose private army made attempts to take over Mexico, Nicaragua and Honduras in the 1850s, was released in November by Chicago Review Press.
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