Lisa Black--The Changing Nature of News

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I've long been a big fan of Lisa Black's Theresa MacLean books, set in Cleveland. In fact, when I went to Cleveland for Bouchercon, I kept seeing Cleveland through Theresa's eyes. 

Lisa, who is herself a forensic scientist, writes the best forensic investigation novels out there. Now, Lisa had debuted a new series, also set in Cleveland, featuring forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner and detective Jack Renner, and, boy, does it have a twist.

Here Lisa shares with us some of the fascinating things Maggie learns in UNPUNISHED:

THE CHANGING NATURE OF NEWS: EVER WONDER WHY WE KNOW MORE ABOUT THE KARDASHIANS THAN WE DO ABOUT SYRIA?

            Well, as a grizzled newspaper editor explains to my character, Maggie, in my new book Unpunished:

“News, as an entity, used to be considered so vital to democracy that the FCC required television channels to have a certain amount of public service content…as if they recognized right away what a time-suck television was going to be. That’s why TV news existed in the first place. When I was a kid you had three networks, they all had the news on at seven and you had no choice but to watch it. But ratings weren’t great—let’s face it, no one in this country has ever been as big on staying informed as we would like to think. So in the late sixties broadcasters discovered market-driven journalism. Fluff, in other words…feel-good stories, lost puppies, recipe ideas and of course, the secret lives of celebrities. It raised ratings and still satisfied the FCC code.

“But then came cable, and people started watching reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore show instead of Dan Rather. A little bit of fluff no longer sufficed. Now we have entire channels of news, quote unquote, that isn’t remotely news. Magazines are the same—they’re probably the only industry in America that’s even worse off than newspapers. Ever wonder why you can stop renewing a magazine and they keep sending it to you for another couple years? Because subscriptions don’t pay for it. Advertisers pay for it, and they want to see high circulation numbers. And corporations want to see profit. Lots and lots of profit.

“And without that profit, no one can afford to create enough new content to fill an entire newspaper. Or an entire 24 hour a day news channel—that’s why I say not just newspapers, but news itself has changed.

“For instance, a lot of the people you see on broadcast news are not reporters. They will show a video segment that looks exactly like a regular old news broadcast, with some pretty person with a perky smile standing on a sidewalk with a microphone telling you about something that happened. She ends with, ‘This is Miss Perfect Teeth in Washington, D.C.’ But Miss Perfect Teeth never tells the viewing audience who she works for. You assume she works for the network, but she actually works for a PR firm or a lobbyist or a candidate. These segments--they’re called Video News Releases-- look just as good and sometimes better than the real thing. The TV channel has twenty-four hours to fill up, VNRs are available, and they’re free. Newspapers get the same thing in printed press releases. The editors got to get the paper into the rollers, and the release is there, and it’s free. So they give it to the copyeditor. Why the hell not? But it’s not news.

  

         

 “We have a whole generation growing up who don’t remember that broadcast news used to mean someone came on and told you what happened. It wasn’t four people sitting around bickering like kids on a playground about their opinion of what happened. Then they bring on ‘experts’ and ‘consultants’ who get a few minutes to push whatever agenda they’re plugging that week. They look good, sound professional, and play into the political leanings of the target audience. But when they’re done all the audience has gotten is a slightly classier version of the Jerry Springer show, which apparently keeps them entertained enough that they don’t complain. But what they don’t get is useful information.”  Such as the play-by-play in Syria.

            This is only one of the lessons that forensic scientist Maggie Gardiner learns as she is thrust into this miasma of moving targets. Along with homicide detective Jack Renner, she works to learn why the staff of the local paper keep turning into that day’s headline…and that perhaps Jack has not entirely given up the questionable ways of peacekeeping she discovered in That Darkness. 

Lisa Black has spent over 20 years in forensic science, first at the coroner’s office in Cleveland Ohio and now as a certified latent print examiner and CSI at a Florida police dept. Her books have been translated into 6 languages, one reached the NYT Bestseller’s List and one has been optioned for film and a possible TV series. 

www.lisa-black.com

@LisaBlackAuthor

 

DEBS: And here's more about UNPUNISHED

      

       It begins with the kind of bizarre death that makes headlines—literally. A copy editor at the Cleveland Herald is found hanging above the grinding wheels of the newspaper assembly line. Forensic investigator Maggie Gardiner has her suspicions about this apparent suicide inside the tsunami of tensions that is the news industry today—and when the evidence suggests murder, Maggie has no choice but to place her trust in the one person she doesn’t trust at all….

        Jack Renner is a killer with a conscience, a vigilante with his own code of honor. He has only one problem: Maggie knows his secret. She insists he enforce the law, not subvert it. But when more newspaper employees are slain, Jack may be the only person who can help Maggie unmask the killer--even if Jack is still checking names off his own private list.

READERS, do you remember when news was news?

 

Lisa Black--What Do You Do When...

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of the great things about being part of

Jungle Red is getting to have your favorite authors as guests.  Lisa Black is one of mine. She's also an author you can depend on to get things right in her series about forensic scientist Theresa Maclean--Lisa is a forensic scientist, and swears she spent the happiest five years of her life in a morgue, working for the Cleveland coroner's office.   Although she sets her novels in Cleveland, Lisa is now a latent print examiner and CSI in Florida for the Cape Coral Police Department.

Here's a little set-up about Lisa's new book:

The Price of Innocence begins with Theresa and Frank (Theresa's cop cousin) caught in an explosion possibly aimed at a local inventor/entrepreneur, the northeast version of Bill Gates. Ignoring her bruises and forced to relinquish the investigation to the feds, Theresa tries to dive back into normalcy at work only to have a cop assassinated nearly at her feet. These two apparently unrelated cases begin to move closer and closer together as Theresa encounters the unpredictable world of methamphetamine production, an attractive and mysterious man, a circle of new  money and power and a conspiracy of silence going back twenty years—the reach of which she could never have imagined. 

Sounds great, yes?  And here's what the reviewers have had to say:

Publisher’s Weekly said: "With only her gut to go on, she—and the reader—scud through a series of devilishly clever blind alleys and red herrings." Booklist reported: "Quick pacing, a keep-’em-guessing plot, plenty of dark humor, and a spunky, outspoken, whip-smart heroine make this a must-read for fans of Cornwall and Grafton." Kirkus wrote, "Once again, Black constructs a puzzle that weaves olds crimes with new, always leaving room for one more twist."

Fabulous, right?  How could anyone not love this book? I certainly did!

But here's what happened to Lisa.        

LISA BLACK:  We’ve all been there--at least I hope we’ve all been

there, I hope it wasn’t just me--when, after we’ve spent five or six or nine months writing a book, and our critique partners like it, and our family and friends love it, and we send it to our agent waiting to hear how much she loves it too… she hates it.

      Not just “this character doesn’t seem realistic” or “this part of the story drags” or “this subplot isn’t sufficiently compelling” (how I’ve grown to hate that word!).  No, flat-out, unequivocal, don’t-even-bother -rewriting-this. Throw it out and start over. Nearly a year of your life, tossed aside in one delicately worded phone call or, worse, e-mail.

      Please tell me it’s not just me.

      But one of the most saving and yet most difficult things about writing is how “different strokes for different folks” is not just an adage, it’s a truth. One person’s literary genius is another’s boring claptrap. A friend found Meet the Parents hilarious while I found it barely watchable. Another can’t stomach any sort of fantasy or science fiction no matter how well done. And books--I’ve had books I’ve been completely gaga over, from Gone Girl to Brian Freeman’s Immoral to the idiosyncratic but priceless Ranchero by Rick Gavin…then I gave them to my trusted siblings only to have the reactions range from ‘meh’ to ‘ick.’

      And so it should not be surprising that while my first (brilliant) agent caused me to throw The Price of Innocence into a drawer, my second (equally brilliant) agent encouraged me to bring it out again when new publisher Severn was already asking for a follow-up before Blunt Impact even hit the stands. She tried it and, lo and behold, she liked it.

      Joy. Not because the months I spent writing it would not have been in vain (though that is a huge consideration--life is short after all) but because she confirmed for me that I am not crazy. The Price of Innocence is perhaps the most freeform of my poetry, the most boldly colored of my artwork. I let my character go out on limbs I couldn’t have stomached ten years ago. This book is like your smallest child, the one whose quirks and inconsistencies mean he will never play on the football team or be elected to office but who throws himself at every situation with such boundless enthusiasm that even while bandaging his knee for the forty-leventh time, you love him most of all.

      Point being, though we all know how people’s opinions can vary, it still comes as a shock when books we love aren’t unequivocally loved by others. Why is that? 

DEBS: I keep thinking about JK Rowling, and all the agents and editors who hated Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone... Do they still wonder how they could have made such a mistake?

What about you, fellow REDS, have you had an experience like Lisa's?

And readers, have you loved a book and had a trusted reading friend hate it? How do you deal with that?