From Music Critic to Columnist to Your New NSNC President

By Tony Norman
NSNC President

If some kid hadn’t vomited on me at a David Bowie/Nine Inch Nails concert in 1995, I wouldn’t be a newspaper columnist today.

I was the pop music/pop culture critic at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (PG), where I’ve been employed since November 1988. I’m still at the PG, but my status may have already fallen into the “complicated” territory by the time this column is posted depending on whether a long-anticipated strike has occurred or merely been forestalled. And since I’m also a proud union member, I may be a columnist without a newspaper column for the first time since 1996 after the dust clears and I’m free to use as many clichés as I want. But I digress.

I showed up at the Bowie/Nine Inch Nails concert dressed in a gray suit appropriate for the proper Unitarian wedding I had attended a few hours earlier. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get home to change and make it to the concert on time. 

That also meant skipping the reception and leaving early rather than risk getting caught in Saturday-evening traffic on the road to the Coca-Cola Star Lake Amphitheater in Burgettstown, Pa., a 23,000-seat venue tucked in a sleepy, dusty corner of Appalachia.

Arriving one song into Nine Inch Nails’ set, I immediately found myself plunged into the stygian darkness surrounded by thousands of Marilyn Manson’s children. They were wearing black clothes and exuding the bad vibes of the young and the damned with guttural intensity. The marijuana and hillbilly ganja smoke had already begun conspiring to create its own weather system under the pavilion. 

Even without an official head count, I was reasonably sure that even if I wasn’t the only Black guy at the concert that night, I was most likely the only one within a 50-mile radius wearing a suit from the Men’s Wearhouse with zero ironic intent.

While being escorted to my seat in a row roped off from the demonic hoi polloi, I felt a little like Cleavon Little’s character riding into Rock Ridge at the beginning of “Blazing Saddles.” I also couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something ridiculous about being there in the first place. 
Along with a handful of peers from other newspapers, we had an entire row to ourselves with more than a dozen seats to spare. This did not sit well with the paying customers jockeying for better views behind us. It made for a combustible situation with the burly bouncers who continuously monitored us while patrolling the aisles. 
When I stood to get a better look and take notes during the evening’s first duet between Bowie and Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, a fetid cloud suddenly enveloped me; it mingled with my own breath in the crisp night air. 
Still, I didn’t connect the odor to its source until I felt the first spatters on the back of my pants. I was already hoping against hope I had accidentally knocked over a bottle of water or Coke had spilled on me, but I knew I wasn’t that clumsy. When I turned to assess the damage, I saw an inebriated guy still emptying his guts into my empty seat. 
I stared at him in disbelief. After all the retching was over, he casually wiped his mouth with hollow-eyed nonchalance. He offered no apologies and no gesture of embarrassment. He was too out of it to realize he’d make things quite awkward for me the rest of the evening as I stood there with vomit-splattered pants wondering how I could ever have rationalized being a 35-year-old pop music critic. Life was way too short for this.

The following week I went to the PG’s editor-in-chief John G. Craig, Jr., and told him I wanted to do something else. I don’t remember his exact words, but he did ask with a hint of incredulity what else I thought I was qualified to do. 

When I told him that I wanted to be the PG’s first Black columnist, he scoffed. “Christ, the PG doesn’t need a ‘Black columnist,’ but we could always use another good columnist,” he said as if the two were mutually exclusive.

After submitting three tryout columns, I waited for more than half a year for a greenlight. My opportunity came after veteran columnist Tom Hritz retired, opening his spot. There was a brief “Hunger Games”-like struggle for the spot with other aspiring columnists, but I finally got the go-ahead.
Still, I was told that my stint was probationary and warned that if the column failed to connect with readers it would be “cut and replaced” fairly quickly.

When my column debuted with my face above it in the spring of 1996, it was immediately controversial. It made a connection with a lot of readers — but in the wrong way. 

The space once occupied by the familiar, older, working-class white guy was now occupied by the photo of a Black guy with a somewhat smirky face someone once described as the newspaper equivalent of “J’Accuse!” 
 
I was a foreigner on real estate they had claimed as their own. I went to my predecessor for advice. “Fuck ‘em,” Tom Hritz said while having a laugh at my expense. “Just be yourself. All you owe them is a good column written to the best of your abilities. Some readers will never come around, but others will love you or grow to love you.”

Sage advice! My readership grew exponentially the following year and the column began winning every top local, regional, and statewide award. I began getting solicitations from bigger newspapers to consider jumping ship. It was a heady time to be a columnist despite my “never-ending probation” that hasn’t ended to this day. Then, two-and-a-half years after the column began, I found myself mingling with dozens of other newspaper columnists from across the country in the hospitality suite of a fairly tacky hotel in Louisville, Kentucky.

The National Society of Newspaper Columnists informed me weeks earlier that I had “won something” but that I had to come to the Louisville conference in person to get it.

Apparently, the PG’s ambitious contest Czarina had entered my columns in NSNC’s 1999 contest without telling me, so I had no idea what the organization was about until I got to the conference. Over the course of those three glorious days, I learned a lot and haven’t looked back.

When my name was announced as the 1999 winner in the top newspaper-circulation category at the awards dinner, I was flabbergasted. I didn’t make a speech other than to say “thanks.” I grabbed the $500 check and the enormous translucent trophy and sat down as quickly as possible, convinced everyone would soon realize a terrible mistake had been made. 
After partying at the hospitality suite that final night with my newfound friends, I retreated to my hotel room and cried tears of gratitude and relief. Where would I be if some kid hadn’t vomited on my pants, prompting me to make some big changes in my career trajectory?

I was recruited to be an officer in NSNC in the early aughts. I hosted the 2002 conference in Pittsburgh which came off incredibly smoothly considering the previous year’s trauma in America. I was a regular dues-paying member and conference attender until about 2007.

I returned to the NSNC fold a few years ago hungry for inspiration and connections with old and new friends. The Buffalo conference in 2019 convinced me that NSNC was now better and more relevant than it had ever been. A new generation had taken over the leadership reins on the advisory board. There were plenty of new ideas about how to get the NSNC’s affairs in order.

Now, it is my honor to serve as NSNC’s president for the next two years after a stint as vice president. I’m following two beloved presidents in this role: Lisa Smith Molinari and my immediate predecessor Chris Carosa.
NSNC’s patron saint and executive director Suzette Standring recently stepped down as well. Fortunately she will be sticking around in an advisory capacity as NSNC’s new executive director Steve Aust begins what already promises to be a distinguished and consequential stewardship of our business affairs and organizational direction in consultation with the board. 

I’m looking forward to the challenges to come. We have a conference in Alabama in 2021 to look forward to (pandemic willing). Along the way, the NSNC will be busy figuring out new ways to make ourselves as relevant and useful to our members as possible during an age of social distancing. 
I’ll write a monthly column for this newsletter that will be a lot less self-indulgent and a lot shorter than this one, I promise. I was given a word limit of 500 and I obviously blew right through that ceiling. I also missed the deadline for turning this in, so this has already been an auspicious start, hasn’t it? 

The only reason I’m not intimidated is that I’m working with the most dedicated and competent board imaginable. Even my obvious flaws and limitations can’t mess things up. Feel free to reach out to me at tonynorman@comcast.net.

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NSNC President Tony Norman is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. He’s also on the advisory board of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists and a founding board member of the International Free Expression Project.