“Make freaky friends,” Lane DeGregory tells other journalists. “Look for the bruise on the apple.”
BY MOLLY HUNSINGER
USFSP Student Reporter
ST. PETERSBURG – Flashing her contagious smile and spreading cheerful morning greetings, Lane DeGregory buzzes around the newsroom of the Tampa Bay Times like a bee pollinating flowers.
She stops at her photo- and memento-filled cubicle to gather a few folders and pops open the tab of a Diet Coke before heading to her meeting.
DeGregory has been working for six months on a complex feature about hospice care for the Times’ monthly Floridian magazine. Because the enterprise team recently lost its editor, the newspaper’s managing editor, Jennifer Orsi, is filling in and ready to offer feedback on DeGregory’s 7,000-word first draft.
DeGregory says she and Orsi have not found a rhythm and she’s unsure about the story. Too many characters, too many scenes, and she doesn’t quite know how to fix it.
Orsi begins with compliments.
The draft has all the elements of a signature Lane DeGregory feature. Hardship, humility, hope.
“I don’t know how you do it, but I felt like I was right there,” Orsi says. “Every time someone died, I cried.”
“Good!” DeGregory beams. “I Hallmark-ed it!”
Orsi shifts gears. “Are these people too good?” she challenges. “Too angelic?” Can we “dirty them up a little bit?”
They begin to talk through it.
Orsi says she wonders, where are the anger and frustration? She suggests that everyone sounds “too good to be true…they can’t all be saints…..Can we hear stories about people pooping (on) themselves and flinging food?”
DeGregory is afraid this story could use the “elephant carver,” her nickname for the editor whose guidance helped shape many of her prize winning pieces.
Orsi continues to push.
“Can we reveal some of the stresses the (hospice) workers have? Do people need to go to counseling? Do people quit?”
DeGregory lights up, “Yes!” She describes a bigoted remark a patient made to a gay hospice worker who walks out as a result.
This is a compact way of showing their limits, they decide.
Still Orsi presses, “I think we need a little more bruise on the apple,” she says, using one of DeGregory’s favorite phrases. “We need more tension.”
DeGregory divulges some of the hard stuff later – but not to Orsi or readers of the Times.
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Since the Pulitzer board started giving out prizes in 1917, the Tampa Bay Times has won 10 of these prestigious awards. Lane DeGregory won Pulitzer No. 7 for the Times. She has won dozens of other distinguished national awards. For the past 15 years, she has written richly detailed human interest and feature stories for the Times.
Her pieces often garner national attention and galvanize support for many of her subjects, whose stories would otherwise be unknown to the world. She’s written about orphans, drug addicts, people in jail, teen mothers, runaways, buskers and even washed-up circus sideshow freaks.
“Everybody in our community has a story – whether it’s the old lady sitting on a bench or the guy who’s out there feeding the pigeons,” DeGregory says.
She says she likes to reveal the unknown about people who may have been stereotyped by society – the homeless, the drunks, the prostitutes. “I want you to know the beyond the label.”
Her unconventional means of spotting subjects worthy of her time and talents are as interesting as the stories themselves. Time and again she’s taken a press release nobody else in the newsroom would touch and turned it into a front-page tear-jerker.
Often she shares her top 20 story mining tips at journalism lectures and conferences. Little nuggets of wisdom like “Talk to strangers.” “Make freaky friends.” “Look for the bruise on the apple.” She says she can strike up a conversation with just about anyone using ice breaking, relatable topics like dogs, kids or cars.
DeGregory is energetic and gregarious with sympathetic eyes and a raspy voice. When she smiles, her eyes squint, her cheeks get rosy and she exudes empathy and warmth – her secret weapon. Her long, wavy hair is blonde with subtle streaks of natural gray. She wears silver, bohemian jewelry; her bangle bracelets jingle when she gestures with her arms as she speaks.
She loves her dogs – Murphy the pit bull-chocolate lab and Taz the Australian cattle dog.
Her life is busy and full. A blend of career, friends and family.
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DeGregory’s husband Dan, shown here with her and their sons Tucker (left) and Ryland last year, is always the “first read” on her rough drafts, she says.
DeGregory has been married to her husband Dan for 23 years. They met in college. He was “a total hippie boy,” she says – 6-2 with long hair and tie dye shirts. He plays drums in a Grateful Dead cover band, both then and now.
“He’s always my first read,” she says, complimenting the editing skills he refined in college.
He aspired to become a book editor, which lasted “for about a minute,” she says, “but he always played in these bands. That was his thing.” Two decades later, it still is.
DeGregory expects he will go back on the road one day after their boys leave the nest. But that life is not for her.
They have two sons in their final years of high school: 18-year-old Ryland, the shy drummer, and 17-year-old Tucker, the outgoing thespian.
“My kids have been really, really involved in my life as a professional,” she says. “They’ve been exposed to stories for good and for bad.”
She remembers pushing around a stroller with a diaper bag on her shoulder when Ryland was as young as 6 months old while covering a story.
Her youngest, Tucker, says, “She’s been the best mom…always wanting to marry her personal life with her work life without integrating the two completely.”
There have been some perks.
Every year she volunteered to cover the state fair so she could take the kids along. And they would do travel stories and take vacations on house boats or to Costa Rica.
Tucker says he “loved being her companion on business trips to journalism conferences, too.” He’d help build and set up her presentations and they’d make a fun weekend out of it. Tucker even came up with the title of her Pulitzer Prize winning story, “The Girl in the Window.”
The boys have seen the rough parts, too.
They’ve met many of her story subjects, often people down on their luck. “She’s always been big on preaching against prejudging others, which absolutely dictates how she handles her relationships in her personal life and especially in her professional life with her subjects,” Tucker says.
DeGregory thinks it’s been good for them to see all the different demographics that journalists get to see.
“You get to realize how in the middle of society you are,” she says. “You get to see the poorest out of the poor, homeless, draggy people. You get to go to the governor’s mansion and interview the richy, richy people.”
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Want to strike up a conversation with a stranger? Try an ice breaking topic like dogs, kids or cars, says DeGregory.
DeGregory was destined to be a writer. She says she knew specifically that she wanted to be a newspaper reporter at the age of 6.
Her father read the newspaper every morning at the breakfast table.
She squeals with delight recalling her fascination with the Watergate scandal, thinking, “These two young guys are bringing down the president of the United States? I want to do that!”
Being an over-achiever is in her genes. Her mother went to Duke, her father was a nuclear engineer and her sister is a professor of philosophy at University of Miami.
Young, ambitious Lane grew up in Rockville, a suburb in Maryland.
She created an elementary school paper, which her mom typed. And she went on to be the editor of her middle school, high school and college papers.
She earned a bachelor’s degree in English and master’s degree in rhetoric and communications studies from University of Virginia.
DeGregory’s passion for newspapers never wavered. “All the way through, this is my thing, these are my people. It’s always been my identity.”
Every job she had growing up, with the exception of babysitting, was in journalism.
“I set car ads, I sold ads, I type set in high school…Every time I think about what else I’d want to do, I can’t imagine not being in that world,” she says.
She launched her professional career as a reporter at the Daily Progress, the local paper in Charlottesville.
Two years later she was churning out two to three stories a day at the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot. For seven of her 10 years there, she covered everything from city council meetings to marlin tournaments.
When she was selected for a narrative writing team, she went from writing up to three news stories a day to spending the time it takes to write a human interest story. “I went from being a reporter to a writer,” she says.
An editor helped shape her conversational writing style. “What’s the story you come home at night and tell your husband while you’re having dinner?” she recalls him saying. “That’s the story. You should start writing like that.”
So she did.
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The St. Petersburg Times (now the Tampa Bay Times) had a feature writing position open in 2000 – a rarity.
DeGregory sent in some clips and crossed her fingers.
Mike Wilson says when he reviewed her clips he loved the voice and detail of her writing. He hired her and was her editor for the next 13 years.
She called him her elephant carver – an inside joke. Something about carving an elephant out of soap.
He left the Times for another editing position in 2013.
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Wilson says there are a few qualities that set DeGregory apart from other writers.
“She just loves everybody,” he says. There is “not a judgmental bone in her body.” Her empathy and genuine interest in people is what makes them open up and share their personal stories.
She has a “genius for asking the right questions,” he says. DeGregory always returns from covering a story with volumes of information – never a detail left undiscovered.
If DeGregory sees a child’s rag doll as an important detail in the story, Wilson says, she knows the doll’s name, hair color, the pattern of its dress, where the holes or stains are on the dress and how they got there and if the child sleeps with the doll every night.
“All of us can wish for a partnership like that,” says Leonora LaPeter Anton of Lane’s synergy with Wilson. Anton is DeGregory’s best friend, enterprise teammate and cubicle neighbor. They met on DeGregory’s first day at the Times 15 years ago.
Anton says Wilson not only helped hone in and carve out the polished story from DeGregory’s long first drafts, he pushed her outside the comfort zone of her naturally sunny disposition. He encouraged her to ask those hard questions, or track down an unsavory character of the story. Time after time, it uncovered hidden pieces of the puzzle that gave the story a whole new twist.
DeGregory says she wasn’t going to interview the birth mother for “The Girl in the Window” but the elephant carver made her do it.
“Everybody said that was the best part of the story,” she acknowledges.
“The Girl in the Window” won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2009. DeGregory spent six months following the story of Dani, a child who had been deemed feral and autistic from years of severe neglect, and the remarkable couple who adopted her. The story was picked up nation-wide, causing a surge in adoptions, and brought Simon and Schuster to DeGregory’s door to buy the rights for a book.
“Then Oprah screwed it over,” she says. “I am not an Oprah fan.”
Winfrey put the family on TV and made them sign a non-compete clause preventing them from talking to anybody else, including DeGregory, who had broken the story.
“I don’t think she (Dani) has got a very good future,” DeGregory says with a look of caution, sadness and pity.
The lights are on but nobody’s home.
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Melissa Lyttle, the photographer who captured the haunting eyes of Dani, is another favorite colleague of DeGregory who, like Wilson, has left the Times.
“To say Lane gets it is an understatement…she is a photographer’s writer,” Lyttle says.
Lyttle’s first encounter with a Lane DeGregory story was getting sucked in to “Saying goodbye to Dakota,”’ DeGregory’s first person account of putting down her 14-year-old dog.
“Damn you, DeGregory, for making me cry into my cereal,” Lyttle says.
A year later, DeGregory requested Lyttle for a story, the first of many collaborations to come.
Lyttle says DeGregory will “never stop a moment in progress.” She lets things unfold, observes and takes notes, never interrupts a scene.
She’ll gravitate toward a bulletin board, a refrigerator or a desk, jotting down anything and everything that might enrich the story.
She fills stacks and stacks of notebooks with her left-handed scribble, organizing notes in columns – for details about the scene, for quotes, for questions.
Her son Tucker says “her reporting/writing process is INSANE,” and she gets “100 times the information that she ends up using.”
She writes from her home in Gulfport in a cool little nook overlooking her front lawn, sifting through and typing out the massive volumes of notes, immersing herself in the story details with photos from the scene taped around her for inspiration.
Often she’ll write on into the wee hours of the night, emerging only for refills of Diet Coke.
Her primary focus when she writes is the construction of the narrative, the perspectives and voicing. Statistics are secondary.
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DeGregory “writes with such heart and compassion for her subjects,” says Mike Wilson, her editor for many years.
Her colleagues marvel at her ability to transform all these bits and pieces of information into life-changing stories that motivate and inspire.
“She writes with such heart and compassion for her subjects,” says Wilson, her longtime editor. He estimates that easily “half a million-dollars’ worth of love money” has resulted when readers were moved to take action by DeGregory’s stories.
People write hundreds of letters, make thousands of phone calls, write checks, feed, clothe and adopt children because of her stories.
She is persistent and it pays off.
DeGregory wrote several stories about Davion Only, a teenage orphan who took his plea for adoption to a church pulpit. The first story went viral on social media, was picked up by news media all over the world and generated 10,000 phone calls from people who wanted to adopt him.
“It’s great when people respond like that, I just think, aww, I have the best job in the world,” she says.
After all the attention turned Davion’s world upside-down, he was still stuck in the foster care system. She wrote again and again until he finally was adopted.
Anton says this compassion and tenacity are present in all areas of DeGregory’s personal and professional life. She says DeGregory has “made me a more thoughtful, kinder person.”
DeGregory brings people thoughtful little tokens out of the blue – a note, a bottle of wine, a jewelry box. If somebody’s sick she’ll organize everyone to fill their freezer with cannelloni from Mazzaros.
DeGregory loves people and people love DeGregory. So what’s the bruise on her apple?
Anton says DeGregory can’t say no to anyone, and if you are trying to go anywhere with her it’s tough to leave the building. She talks to everyone along the way – passengers on the elevator, the security desk attendant, people in the lobby.
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Covering the lofty walls in the lobby of the Tampa Bay Times building are over-sized, front-page blow-ups. The headlines showcase the breadth of the acclaimed newspaper’s history:
Titanic Sinks With 1,530 Souls Aboard.
Shocked World Mourns Kennedy Assassination.
St. Petersburg and Tampa United.
Lane DeGregory has made a significant contribution to the past 15 years of this history.
But it’s a strange and uncertain time for journalism. DeGregory discovered narrative journalism at the beginning of the movement and made it to the top. She won the Pulitzer and started speaking at national conferences. And then the bottom dropped out.
“The year I won the Pulitzer Prize was the first year that everybody started getting laid off,” she says.
Now there’s a palpable disconnect in the industry. Multimedia, social media and millennials are taking over.
“I’m 48, Leonora is 50. All the people in their 60s – the Rob Hookers – are all gone so there’s no one up there to look up to. And then a lot of the 30something-year-olds left for other jobs, website jobs and such,” DeGregory says. “There’s not anyone with experience. There’s a hole in the middle.”
What’s the next chapter for DeGregory?
She may have lost a few colleagues and her nest may soon be empty, but she is staying her course.
“This has been a blessing to me. I don’t think I could have done news another 20 years,” she says.
She’s tried on a few hats that seem to fit other journalists. She taught at the local university, takes freelance work once in a while and has entertained the idea of writing a book.
But she loves writing for the Times.
“I love living here. I love this area, I love the beach, I love Florida,” she says.
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DeGregory says she misses having someone like the elephant carver around to inspire her. “I just wanted to make him proud of me, you know,” she says.
But ultimately, DeGregory has her own instincts to follow.
She contemplated including some of the hard things she witnessed while covering the hospice story in her first draft. But they made her wince.
“I probably err on the side of wanting to leave out the warts and the scars more than I should,” she admits.
One of the patients had lost all her muscular control. She and her husband had been married for 45 years.
“She can’t poop!” DeGregory says with levity and sincerity at the same time. “So he’s got to go in there and pull out her poop! Now that’s love, right? Can you imagine having to do that for your husband or him having to do that for you?”
It was too humiliating for them for DeGregory to consider including these details. They had trusted her to tell their story about their real life experience.
“If I was writing a fiction story, oh yeah, I’d be in that butthole! I’d be like, OK, we’re going in! But it’s a real person with a daughter and a son who live here and friends from church who are going to read it,” she says.
“To try to share strangers’ souls on the page for 300,000 people to read. I feel like it’s a burden and a privilege at the same time.”