“One skill that I've always had is the ability to piss people off”
Roy Bragg
San Antonio Express News’ own Roy Bragg, social media and roving reporter, came to speak to us on Tuesday evening.
As it turns out Bragg is an exceptionally interesting and chill guy who counts among his favorite writers Chuck Palahniuk, P.J. O' Rourke and Stephen Crane and enjoys reading the Wall Street Journal.
We gathered around a living room setting in the corner of Old Main 320 as he quickly made himself comfortable, crossing a Converse Chuck Taylor over the other and simply asking us bluntly, “Now what?”
Bragg graduated from Texas A&M University. He remembered drawing and telling stories as a kid. He wrote for the high school newspaper and in college for the Battalion. He married the first couple of years and never did an internship while at A&M.
Instead, he wrote incessantly and gathered clips after clips of aggressive stories. He recalls being what he refers to as “barbaric” about taking people’s stories, adapting a “If you’re not going to cover it, I will” mentality.
He proceeded to tell about his lengthy relationships with newspapers, including the Austin and Houston Chronicle, his feature adventures and his over 340 visits to different state county courthouses across the country.
He believes small papers are a treasure and a great start for students. He remembered them as being a place where stories just landed on his lap, a chance to do everything.
While at small papers he covered small town controversies that had real value in those days. It was a time free from web, cable and cell phones. Stories appeared to have a unique, rich legitimacy then. Interesting things happened simply because people had nothing to do, like the guy he told us about that collected only red chairs.
He wrote a story on a lady who had a museum of family heirlooms, among them Lee Harvey Oswald’s bottle opener.
He expressed disappointment about the change in these towns, how people watch Fox news now and attend online message boards. “These people aren't hicks anymore. Back in those days, it was a hoot,” he said, traveling quickly from one memory to the other.
In his time with the Austin Chronicle, he remembered waiting outside former governor Bill Clements' car for an interview. Clements kept declining saying, “Ughh, I’m not going to speculate anything!” But Bragg kept hanging out by his car, finally one day he asked Clements if there was anything he wanted to speculate and he cracked.
He ended up at San Antonio Express News where he got his hands on a little bit of everything, breaking news, columns on business and technology and the Olympics in Sydney.
He talked about how every now and then he started to find these stories. He remembered a story that took place in Shiner, Texas. The football team had shiner beer insignia and was the only team he knew of that had a polka as their fight song.
He looked into an empty space around us with a sense of nostalgia, and semi-sighed as he told us about a time newspapers could afford to fly reporters to Detroit where a place crashed and to places of natural disasters.
He told us about a story he worked on about a kid that disappeared in Brownsville. It turns out people were carving up kids in Matamoros. The Chronicle (he didn’t say which) flew him in and he would have 30 minutes to turn the story around.
Bragg thinks that newspapers are too small now and compared them to gum wrappers. Print newspapers are no place for a 2,000-word story. This is why He enjoys his blog, he can post pictures with subtext, links with lengthy stories.
His advised us to tell stories, to gravitate to things where we can do it.
The clip that got him hired was one he wrote in ’79 or’80 about the movie Homer, street gangs in New York and it’s trend nationally. He tracked down the producer of the movie.
The point is not to be afraid, even when we annoy people. “They would rather you get it right than wrong,” he said. He advised us to be willing to appear vulnerable. After all, we are depending on the kindness of strangers. He also suggested we build relationships with underlings, not people in charge.
In terms of understanding your relationship with your editor, he recommended we remember that even though we may sometimes not agree with the way our editors changed our stories, their purpose is not to make you fail. In the end we shouldn’t sweat every detail. Bragg doesn’t, he rarely reads his own stories in the paper.
For more on Bragg visit his blog. Check out his Halloween post about a ghost in haunted hotel in Schulenburg, who, in his opinion, didn’t abide by normal ghost rules.
