public issues, private lives

Sandy Close, the executive editor of Pacific News Service, usually arrives at her small San Francisco offices by 6 a.m., and for the next twelve hours she spends most of her time devising new ways to explore the forces that shape the lives of the people on the margins of American society -- the janitor from Guatemala, the chef from Shanghai, the homeless man from Oakland.

Two decades of such long days were recently rewarded in an extraordinary way: on June 12, she became the first editor to win one of the Chicago-based MacArthur Foundation's no-strings-attached "genius grants." In giving Close the award -- $315,000 over five years -- the foundation said that she "has produced groundbreaking journalism on a shoestring budget for more than twenty years, and has nurtured many writers with unconventional views."

Since 1974, the fifty-two-year-old Close has been the prime force behind PNS, the nonprofit, mostly-print wire service, which syndicates more than 300 articles a year to some 110 clients, including such major publications as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Many PNS pieces involve the private ramifications of public issues, and most are written by members of the communities -- inner city, adolescent, evangelistic, immigrant, Muslim -- directly affected by those issues.

Partly because of its extensive coverage of issues -- poverty, alienation, etc. -- that are usually of concern to liberals, PNS has often been pigeonholed as left-wing by many newspaper and magazine editors, who would undoubtedly be surprised to learn that its top editor voted for George Bush in 1992 and is anti-abortion. A sampling of PNS stories, in fact, makes it clear that PNS has no knee-jerk politics. "The media are so obsessed with political polarization," says Close. "They can only see 'left' and 'right.' They can only mirror the L.A. Times op-ed page -- 'on the left this, on the right that.' That doesn't tell you anything! How does that explain the moan coming out of America?"

The MacArthur award comes just as PNS is launching "Exploring America's Social Disintegration and Pathways for Reintegration," an ambitious year-long project that will comprise TV and radio essays, articles, public forums, and two books. The project --which is scheduled to include articles on such topics as "Vampire Kids: Why Steven King Resonates With This Generation's View of the World" and "The New Preachers: Converting California Back to Protestantism" -- will focus on California, in part because, Close has written, that is where "the contradictory forces within American society . . . are coming to a head most rapidly."

PNS was founded in 1970 by a group of scholars and writers -- including Close's husband, Franz Schurmann -- who were against the war in Vietnam and wanted to provide the national media with an alternative source of information about it. Before taking the reins at PNS, where she was entrusted with shifting the organization's focus toward domestic concerns, Close worked as the China editor for an economic review in Hong Kong, as the founder and editor of a black community newspaper in Oakland, and as a prison rights activist.

The list of her current and former PNS colleagues includes John Markoff of The New York Times, Hugh Pearson of The Wall Street Journal, Frank Viviano
 of the San Francisco Chronicle, and essayist Richard Rodriguez (best known for his commentaries on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour). As the MacArthur Foundation noted, Close has an uncanny knack for plucking writers out of places most editors would never think to look. "She's a great finder," says David Talbot, the arts and features editor at the San Francisco Examiner. "She takes people who don't think of themselves as journalists and convinces them that they are."

Often, assignments from Close have created side careers for people in other disciplines. In late 1979, when virtually everyone in the U.S. media was demonizing the Ayatollah Khomeini, Close was determined to publish a piece exploring why it made sense to the Iranians for them to seize the hostages. Close called around, and eventually a friend mentioned that she might contact William Beeman, an associate professor of anthropology at Brown University. She called him, and he said, "That's interesting, I've never written for newspapers before. Let me try it." The next day, he turn- ed in the first piece of what would become a series. It had such an impact that the U.S. State Department subsequently hired him as a hostage-crisis consultant. He's still writing for PNS sixteen years later.

PNS associate editor Andrew Lam, who immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam in 1975 when he was eleven years old and whose articles have appeared in The New York Times and Mother Jones, got his start in journalism after Close heard from one of his classmates at San Fran- cisco State University that he'd written an essay that had made everybody in the classroom cry when he read it to them. Close called him, met him for coffee, and hired him on the spot. What made Lam stand out? "It was his ability to tell stories," she says.

Lyn Duff, eighteen, grew up in Pasadena, where she was expelled from school in the eighth grade for publishing an underground school newspaper. Because of family problems, she moved to San Francisco when she was sixteen and began living in group homes, shelters, and on the streets -- writing for a small newspaper -- where she remained until last year, when she met Close and began writing for PNS's YO! (Youth Outlook), an eight-page bi-monthly newspaper written by Bay Area youths.

At a recent YO! meeting, Close and the staff looked for story ideas by going around the circle of young writers and having each one tell about an experience that had shaped his or her short life. The real significance of the meeting for the youths, Close observed later, was "the importance of knowing that the other person has a story. People in communications have to be about facilitating communication."

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