The NSNC’s New Veep Has a Résumé Quite Deep

By Dave Astor
NSNC Archivist

Tony Norman, a longtime Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist and former NSNC treasurer, is now back on our board as vice president. In this email Q&A from September 17, Tony seriously/humorously/eloquently discusses everything from the NSNC to his unusually varied, multi-award-winning P-G career – including why he left a music beat to start a column and why he stepped down from the editorial board after the 2016 presidential election. The interview has been slightly shortened (where you’ll see ellipses).

Dave Astor: As the newly named vice president, how does it feel to be on the NSNC board again?

Tony Norman: When Suzette [NSNC executive director Suzette Martinez Standring] called out of the blue to ask me to step in as VP, I originally thought: this can’t end well. LOL! I was NSNC treasurer way back in the early aughts, and though that was largely ceremonial because of my obvious innumeracy, it was still a lot of hard work signing checks and doing treasury-type things… But Suzette assured me that the process of governing NSNC is a lot more share-the-load than it was two decades ago… That was the key to me saying “yes.” I’m a firm believer in the adage “Everyone wants to get to heaven, but nobody wants to die.” Yep, that’s me in a nutshell.

Dave: You were also an NSNC conference host?

Tony: We hosted the 2002 NSNC conference in Pittsburgh. It was a lot of fun once it actually happened, but the lead-up was dicey. We didn’t know what to expect in terms of attendance, so we were pleasantly surprised by the turnout. Also, we had great speakers. I think the fact that it was the year following 9/11 gave the conference some poignancy. Leonard Pitts Jr. was our headliner and he had written a column that pretty much articulated everyone’s feelings during that awful period.

Dave: What do you think of the NSNC?

Tony: The NSNC was the first organization to give me national recognition with a first-place column award win in 1999. The thrill of winning that prize and going to Louisville to collect it is something I’ll never forget. The crew that welcomed me into the ranks that year was warm and irascible. I had finally found that the tribe of columnists extended far outside the insular borders of Pittsburgh. That recognition by the NSNC led to a cover story by Editor & Publisher magazine and a gusher of offers by other newspapers. No doubt about it, it was the beginning of a lot of good things.

Dave: When did you become a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette columnist?

Tony: I’ve been a general-interest columnist since 1996. Previous to that, I was the P-G’s pop music/pop culture critic. One night in 1995, I got vomited on at a David Bowie/Nine Inch Nails concert and decided on the spot I was tired of that life. I was in my mid-30s, so I was already feeling a pronounced lack of dignity whenever folks asked what my beat was at the paper. To be a rock critic in your mid-30s instead of conscientiously working toward a proper mid-life crisis with music appropriate for that period in life felt downright fraudulent. I asked for a change in venue and was given a shot at general columnizing in May or June of 1996.

I was the P-G’s first black columnist. Boy, white Pittsburghers quickly let me know what they thought when they first saw my black face staring back at them. I had replaced a more curmudgeonly old white guy who had reinforced their lack of evolution for years. Suddenly I was in his spot with opinions that simply weren’t Appalachian-approved. The column initially ran once a week and then quickly jumped to twice a week. Outrage increased, but so did my fan base. Fortunately, the folks who loved the column outnumbered the haters by quite a lot. When I started winning all the big awards, the gamble seemed to pay off.

Dave: What do you write about in your column?

Tony: I cover race, politics, popular culture, religion, the absurdity of life, whatever strikes my fancy. Early on, I used to write about my family until my three boys were finally old enough to say in their own sweet way: “Cut that shit out, Pops.” My wife would occasionally get revenge on me by writing letters to the editor complaining about my column, so I stopped writing about her, too. I guess it is more accurate to say I write about anything I want (except my family life). Two of my three boys are married. My oldest even has a son, which makes me and my wife grandparents. My wife wants us to move east so we can be close to our son, his wife, and our grandson Malcolm. We’ll see.

Dave: You also write a business column?

Tony: The business column is a way to do old-fashioned, non-ideological (i.e., non-left-wing) commentary about people and institutions in the community that the business page would typically overlook. It’s an apothecary of odd characters and marginal folks who would otherwise not be covered and read about in the Sunday paper. The column is still quite young, so I’m still finding my footing with it. I have to generate my own leads and get the column in on time. I think I’ve done three so far and I’m currently working on the fourth. The cycle of every other week has been interrupted by vacations and other special projects.

Dave: What’s it like being the P-G’s Sunday book review editor, too?

Tony: I love being the P-G’s book editor. It’s the greatest perk of working at this paper — free books that I get to take home and stack up in gigantic piles that will one day collapse and crush me to death. I love assigning books and editing reviews and coming up with the super clever headlines in print (which are different from the SEO-improved headlines online). I read a lot of books, but I don’t personally review a lot of them. I leave that to my cadre of very capable freelancers. Because of budget constraints, I’ll be reviewing a lot more of them, though.

Dave: When did you join the P-G editorial board? And you stepped down because of Trump?

Tony: I became an associate editor in 1999. At the time I was being wooed by a lot of newspapers — an embarrassing number of newspapers. I actually accepted an offer from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer after spending a week “vacation” out there sitting in on editorial board meetings and touring the city. My proposed office faced Mount Rainier in the distance. I was totally seduced. The money was only slightly better than Pittsburgh, which had me worried. But how could I turn it down? The cost of living even then scared me shitless, but how could I turn it down? When I got back to Pittsburgh, my wife was not pleased because the money wasn’t nearly good enough after the cost of living and three kids were taken into consideration. When I told John Craig, the P-G’s then-executive editor, that I had tentatively accepted an offer from Seattle, he laughed and called me a fool. “Tell you what,” he said. “You’re embarrassing yourself. You haven’t thought this through, obviously. But I’m going to do something you don’t deserve. I’m going to put you on the P-G’s editorial board and give you a big raise, OK? Now stop this silly talk about going to Seattle, you ungrateful wretch.”

It was a great time to get on the P-G’s editorial board. My horizons were definitely expanded meeting local and national movers and shakers. I got to write about serious and complex issues and I got to argue with some of the smartest people at my paper every day.

After many turnovers in leadership, including the firing and eventual death of John Craig, the P-G editorial page entered a new period marked by the election of Donald Trump. The publisher likes Trump and I despise him, so it meant my services were no longer required on a page that planned to have “an open mind” about him. I stopped attending editorial meetings and writing editorials in early 2017. It was a load off my back because I could finally say to folks: “Don’t complain to me about the editorials. I have nothing to do with them.” Unfortunately, my name didn’t come out of the associate editor box until sometime in 2018 after several scandalous editorials forced me to complain bitterly about being tarred unfairly by association.

Dave: You joined the P-G nearly 31 years ago?

Tony: Yeah, I started in November 1988 as a clerk, but the idea was that it was temporary even then. I would have a short window to prove my worth if I wanted to be elevated to the realm of real money at the paper. After my regular shift, I would go out and cover concerts long into the night. I was one of the youngest people on staff and I had a pretty good grip on hip-hop, classic rock, alternative rock, jazz, and a fresh new genre in the early ’90s known as grunge. I was also doing general feature writing. That’s what got me a lot of awards early on. It was embarrassing for the paper to have a clerk winning local journalism awards, so I got promoted to pop music/pop culture in late 1989, early 1990.

Dave: What was it like also being an adjunct journalism professor (at Chatham University starting in 2002) before taking a leave to work on a novel?

Tony: It was strange being an adjunct journalism professor at what was then a women’s college. It’s been coed for about five years now. It’s strange having young faces look at you as if you’re some authority from on high. Early on, I pressed on my students the importance of looking at journalism as an open system where new ways of doing it well were being born every day. There were fundamentals to be learned, but rigidity was something to be avoided at all costs. In those days, journalism still seemed like a viable profession to go into, especially after September 11. When we revived the student newspaper in 2006 after it had been dormant for years, it was an opportunity for students to put the lessons I had been teaching for a few years into practice. It was exciting and harrowing. Lots of mistakes were made.

Dave: What’s your novel about?

Tony: The novel is a work in progress. It is about con men in the American south selling reparation tax credits to gullible churchgoers who naively believe the U.S. Congress has passed a law mandating that every black American receive a one-time disbursement of $92,000 as reparations for an ancestor’s involuntary servitude. There was an actual confidence game in the 1990s that swept Georgia, the Carolinas, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, and Maryland. The IRS had to issue constant warnings about it, but the con still managed to rake in millions of dollars. It flew completely under the national radar. I thought it would be an interesting period and phenomenon to write about. The novel was originally titled “Manumission,” but too many folks had never heard of the act of buying oneself out of slavery. Now the book is called “The Black Tax.” It’s a comedy, believe it or not, in the Kurt Vonnegut/Joseph Heller vein of black humor. It has similarities to Gogol’s classic “Dead Souls,” about a con man buying and selling the souls of dead Russian peasants.

Dave: Another book is coming, too?

Tony: I have a collection of columns that will be published by a small, independent press here in Pittsburgh sometime early in the new year. It makes sense because I do so many speeches and talks and I have nothing to sell. A local publisher approached me, so it’s going to happen. It will be an enticing mix of early, middle, and later columns, I hope, since I have more than two decades worth of columns to choose from.

I’m also working on a collection of original essays for West Virginia University Press. These will be essays heavy on reportage and less opinion-heavy than my columns. They will be a challenge in every way, but I’m looking forward to seeing what I come up with.

I’m also very interested in screenwriting and entering all of these competitions that have opened up in the last year. Hollywood has to fill the demand for original content for all of the streaming services from Amazon to Disney to Netflix. I think I’m kinda clever, so we’ll see what happens. I also learned a shitload about alternative publishing at the last NSNC conference. I was particularly inspired by two workshops that were all about breaking with the dominant paradigms of publishing. It was truly mind expanding and invigorating.

Dave: What else is on your professional plate?

Tony: I do a lot of speaking engagements, though I’ve cut back in the last year to get more writing done. I’m not Dave Lieber, y’know. It takes a lot of energy to be up and enthusiastic about something all the damn time. People always expect me to say something profound, so when I fail to deliver the audience feels cheated. Yet, they keep asking me to come back. It’s a strange ritual of codependency. I do it for the money, obviously.

Dave: Where were you born?

Tony: Born and raised in Philadelphia. I thought of myself as a Philadelphian until I had lived in Pittsburgh for more years than I had lived in Philly. The cultures are quite different, as you know. I’m a Pittsburgher, but I have a deep and abiding love for Philly, even though I can’t navigate its streets without GPS now. The city has changed since I left for college.

Dave: You’re an alum of Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. What did you major in?

Tony: I was a political science major mostly in name only. I spent more time taking English and philosophy courses. I hung out at the college newspaper doing my comic strip in partnership with my roommate Paul Van Arragon. I also wrote music and movie reviews that generated controversy from time-to-time. The student paper was called “The Chimes” and was center-left in its orientation, which was unusual for a newspaper at a Christian college, I suppose. I was part of a staff that got fired for reporting shit it shouldn’t have reported as far as the school administration was concerned. All in all, it was all a valuable lesson in what it means to suffer the consequences for following through in what you believe.

Calvin College is now Calvin University and it is probably the best education money can buy. It’s definitely a more rigorous school than a lot of the Big 10 and maybe even the Ivy League. Its graduates dominate every field they go into, but don’t worry, they’re not like those Liberty University right-wingers and theocrats at all. It’s just a place that gives everyone a solid liberal arts and science education. Yes, the professors all teach and believe in evolution. They’re Christians. They’re not mindless.

Dave: Anything else you’d like to add?

Tony: I’m glad to be back in the bosom of the NSNC. I feel that as long as I stick with you guys, I’ll always have an alibi — or is that plausible deniability? I can never get those two straight.

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