Illustration by Shijing Li
After nearly forty years, F Newsmagazine advisers Paul
Elitzik and Michael Miner announced their retirements — first Miner in Fall 2021 and now Elitzik in Spring 2023. F would not be the paper it has become without them.
To honor the work they’ve done, F sat down with each separately to talk about the paper’s history, present, and future. The following interviews have been edited for clarity and space.
About Paul
PE: I’ve been the F Newsmagazine “janitor” for almost 40 years now. I try to clean up the best that I can. I’ve enjoyed the work enormously and am going to be sad to leave all of the students that I’ve gotten to know. And I know that some of you are going to be here for another year or so. I’m sorry I won’t be here for your graduation.
SG: You’ll be very much missed. We really appreciate having you as F’s adviser. Can you tell us how you ended up at F, a little about your background and what
led you to an advising role?
PE: My background was very chaotic. I wanted to be a poet and a literary critic. I was studying Greek and Latin and philosophy. Then, the anti-war movement came along. So, I got involved in full-time political work, and I even ended up working in factories for a while. I was very much changed by that. I was doing freelance editing. The publishers of a book I was editing went out of business.
PE: So, I started a publishing business. And it was actually because of book publishing that I was actually doing some part-time teaching, mainly writing, and humanities. Carol Becker, who was about to become the dean, wanted to start a newspaper at the school. She had come to a book party I did. I met her there, and then when there was an opening, I applied for it. But someone else started [the paper]. I wasn’t there at the birth.
PE: I was there from its second semester. At the time, we didn’t have a writing program … but the art was great. And there weren’t a lot of those graduate programs that one of our vice presidents said “made us a postmodern art school.” You know, we didn’t have art and technology, we didn’t have the writing program; we didn’t have Visual Critical Studies, let alone New Arts Journalism. It was a more traditional arts school.
SG: What year did the paper start?
PE: 1984. And it was really a very different newspaper in those days.
About Mike
MM: For decades, I worked with Paul Elitzik on F Newsmagazine from the early to mid-1980s. I describe myself as a news person who designs rather than a designer who works for newspapers. I started out delivering the newspaper in my hometown, moved to the circulation department, handling complaints. When I went to college, I went into the newsroom to basically write headlines and do some proofreading. It was a small town newspaper, very small circulation. You got to do everything there, which was nice. And at some point, in 1979, I moved to Chicago from downstate, and talked my way into a design job there, because that was the opening they had. I have an English degree and a Masters in English. Almost all designers back in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s came out of photography or English.
SG: So how did you end up as an adviser at F Newsmagazine? What was that path like?
MM: I was still at the Chicago Reader, at that point. There is a long, hidden history between F News, the Reader, and the school. The person who trained me in design at the Reader, Mary Davis, became publications director at the school. And so when Dean Carol Becker decided they needed a school newspaper because the community at school was rather loose and divided — kind of like it is today. So, when they decided to start a newspaper, she turned to people at the Chicago Reader. Ended up with me. So, it kind of got passed down [through people from the Chicago Reader].
The Development of F
SG: How would you define F’s role at the school then versus now?
PE: Then it was mainly an opportunity for students to get their writing and art published in a newspaper that was going to be distributed, not only in the school, but we started distributing throughout Chicago. It began as a lab course, where people weren’t getting paid but were getting academic and studio credit. It was a while before we moved away from that. After we started selling advertising, we said, “Well, we should be able to pay people out of the revenue we are generating.” And then it got to a point where we were paying a lot more than the revenue. We were able to build up a staff that we wouldn’t otherwise have. And we began to do real journalism and serve the school.
PE: The role of the newspaper in the school, from the very beginning, our mission statement was it was not just a place for people to get published, but also we had the responsibility of servicing the student community and the school community by informing people about events and issues in the school.
MM: I think that the design grew as the writing got better, and you know basically as Paul and I got used to what we were trying to do. So, yeah, the professionalism grew and the attention to the product and the reporting and writing got a lot tighter and closer. There’s always been tension between the editorial staff and the design staff. They don’t necessarily align. But the designers still privilege the aesthetic before the content or the message. So, I guess that was the role that I and Paul developed for myself. Teach the aspect that I brought from newspapers, you know, to their design.
SG: What role did technology play in design? Was that a big change?
MM: Yeah! It is entirely different. It’s gone through three or four generations of technological change since the early 1980s. So much of the effort was put at physically getting it together when we started. It was sent out to a typesetter, a professional typography house. So, it had to come to them, come back and proof, be proofread, go back to them, and then be pasted up finally. So, just gettin it out was a big part of the task at first. Then, the Macintosh arrived, so we started producing those thin strips of type on our own to paste up. So, it was still a physical process and that took a lot of time and the printers were really slow, and the servers were really bad. So, the Mac changed everything when we could actually finally look at a page as a whole with the illustrations in place to work with.
Generations of F Staff
SG: Have there been any specific moments that have stood out to you as kind of defining points in time for F or specific memories that you think about a lot?
PE: You know, there’s just been so much because I’ve been so involved with so many different generations of F staff, and they’re all just wonderful in different ways. But when there were huge movements in the school, then F would respond. And those were very memorable moments. I remember there was this huge demonstration on which people took over Lakeshore Drive on the eve or day after the Invasion of Iraq. The dean was one of the people marking there. And the editor of the newspaper was one of the people who were arrested, when Mayor Daley was so angry over the takeover of Lakeshore Drive, he told the police to do mass arrests, and we had 800 people arrested. We had a special supplement with testimonies from some of the students who were arrested. That was one example. Then, we were very serious. But there were also times when the staff were completely wacky, and I love that.
MM: So, a generation of a student publication is two or three years. So that’s good. It keeps getting refreshed. The concerns of the staff change a lot. There was a sort of golden period around 1991 or 1992, where there were a bunch of star students who just basically wanted to raise surrealist hell, and they were very good at it. Paul Chan was part of that, who’s going on to do big things in the art world. But he also was interested in starting to report about the school and the administration and things like that. There are staff that are really politically active. I’d say the last maybe 10 years, they’ve gotten a lot more focused on election politics, equality, diversity, union organization, a lot of things that an alternative newspaper should be interested in, you know, like the readers do. So that’s gotten a lot more professional and a lot more interesting to design for.
Writing and Design
SG: Do you think there are certain characteristics or certain things that make for good writing, or do you think it is more dependent on the individual writer or topics?
PE: I think that when it comes to writing for an audience, especially with the newspaper magazine, you know, like a lot depends on the ability of the writer and the skill of the writer in understanding the audience that they want and connecting with it. There’s a lot of experimentation that people need to do to develop the kind of skills that they could then use for doing writing that’s going to matter to other people, and a lot of experimentation isn’t going to. It’s lab work. It’s the lab work for the science that’s going to change the world.
SG: Do you think being at an art school, being a student newspaper at an art school, sets F apart from other student papers?
MM: Yes, very much so. Most student papers follow the professional ones. An editor talks to a writer, decides what the visual should be in their head and assigns that to a designer or illustrator. That produces a daily routine, fairly easy to predict visual solutions. F, being at an art school, that was just not going to work, but because students at F are there to build their portfolio and try to express themselves as fully as the writers express themselves. Writers are sometimes designers and designers are sometimes writers, and those types don’t usually mix very much at most newspapers. So there was an understanding and respect for the artistic process that everybody brings. I think the results are a lot less predictable and a lot more interesting.
The Past and the Future
SG: Can you talk a little bit about what it was like working with Paul so closely over this long stretch of time?
MM: So, that’s kind of like asking, “What is your marriage like?” At some point, we realized that outside of our marriages, this was the longest relationship we ever had. That evolved. Wasn’t always smooth. Partly again because of the editorial/design tension. So, you know, in one sense, especially at first, I was an advocate for the design team, as opposed to the editorial team, because the respect for F that has grown within F didn’t exist at that point. But over time, Paul and I sort of educated each other in the two roles. We became friends over time. We could anticipate each other’s arguments. I know much more about Chicago politics than I ever wanted to know from Paul. But it got to be a really comfortable position and a lot of mutual respect. It got to a point in a design meeting during production weekend, and someone would come up with a solution. I could say, “If you’re going to sell that to Paul, you’re going to have to …” So that saved a lot of trouble. We understood each other.
SG: Paul, do you have grand plans for what you will do post F?
PE: Well, my management team, since you asked, has been pressing me to go back full-time into cage fighting.
SG: Of course.
PE: I’m a little conflicted, because I want to leave some time for a family and some travel. Actually, I do want to do more writing.
Advice to Future Generations of F
SG: Do you have advice for the future generations of F?
MM: So, I’m old. I have seen the diminishment of journalism in lots of ways. Basically because of finances. I know the New Arts Journalism closed down because of lack of enrollment at school, which is a byproduct. So getting a job is much harder for people now in journalism. So, I think my advice is to take what you can learn from the collaboration process, the reporting, writing, and interpretation process, and find a place outside of journalism where you can apply those skills. A journalist background is still important. Truth is still important — research, expressing multiple points of view in a detailed, nuanced point of view. All of that is important in many jobs. I do miss F, you know, that’s probably the thing in Chicago that I wish I could still be doing.
PE: I think the direction it has been going in recent years is very promising, where there is a lot more serious reporting about the school, about student life. I think that people learning how to do that kind of journalism has been very important. And I’m very proud to be working with such talented, aspiring journalists. I think if I was going to give any advice, I would say embrace the part of the mission of F that commits you to the school community. One thing I found that I’ve learned a lot from the students is that at its best, the newspaper staff has been a very warm and supportive place to be, where people have looked for ways to be there for each other, and I think this is a reflection of something that has happened in our part of the art community, where there’s much more collaboration and interdisciplinarity. Looking for commonality first, rather than differences. You look at the rest of American society, it’s not like that, you know? I mean, there’s so much division and hate, and we’re trying to have the community here. Sometimes F really succeeds in doing something different.
To view all of the archived editions of F Newsmagazine visit the SAIC Digital Collections.
